On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert@yahoo.com> wrote:
The difference is that json.loads is just deserialize(foo), which pickle.loads inherently has some eval mixed in.
That's why I think for most use cases, the answer is making json easier to extend, not making pickle easier to secure.
My original suggestion was to add a third thing, such as cerealizer, not to restrict pickle or extend json. Some others have talked about restricting pickle, but I don't know how one could do that and still be confident in the safety of the end product. You usually build things to be safe from the ground up, not as some afterthought with a few restrictions.
The biggest problem people have with the json library isn't that you have to do the extending explicitly and externally, but that it's a huge pain to do so. There was a suggestion earlier in this thread (I forget the author) that would go a long way toward relieving that pain.
I feel that'd be very helpful, yes. Obviously not as helpful as something that can handle cyclic references, but those aren't really as important. Besides which, a yaml module could synthesize something more complete out of these pieces (YAML is like JSON, but with support for cyclic references and some extra syntax). My issue is making safe serialization easier, so that not using pickle is a viable option. As you say, we can go a long way towards this using the json module. -- Devin