cryptography default_backend is "hazmat"?

[Paul Moore]

On Sunday, 19 March 2017 03:16:17 UTC, Arthur Darcet  wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 at 23:29, Ian Pilcher <arequipeno at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 03/18/2017 05:15 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > > So the question is: How well do you trust the examples? Are they
> > > likely to be instructing you in a safe way to use this
> > > potentially-dangerous module?
> >
> > But as far as I can tell, there's no way to use many of the non-hazmat
> > functions (e.g. parsing a certificate) without a backend, and all of the
> > backends are "hazmat".
> >
> > So what's the point of marking something as hazmat, if a large portion
> > of the rest of the module can't be used without it?
> >
> 
> If I'm not mistaken, the hazmat module contains functions that are easy to
> misuse, which is why they are hazardous.
> Using those same functions through the "safe" part of the library isn't
> dangerous

I do tend to agree with the OP. As someone who *definitely* doesn't claim to be a security expert, I'd prefer to stick solely to the "for non-expert users only" part of the module. As far as I can see, that part includes only:

1. Fernet symmetric encryption, which is fine, but needs me to manage the key safely (and offers no help in doing that)
2. X509, whose docs are a reference (that you need to understand X509 to follow) and a couple of tutorials on generating/requesting keys. Nothing on using X509 for encryption.

Some of the "obvious" things I'd like to be able to do (e.g., create a message digest, public key cryptography, hashing passwords for storage) are all in the "hazmat" part of the documentation.

So I'm left with the choice of using cryptography and explicitly using parts documented as not suitable for me, or using something else that claims to be robust (but which may not be, depending on whether I trust the author, or prefer to trust the PyCA, who seem to be implying that the subject is too complex for them to be able to provide a non-expert-friendly version, so how come other authors can?)

FWIW, for the 3 examples I gave above, quick Google searches found:

* message digest - the stdlib hashlib module
* public key - pycrypto
* password hashes - passlib

I have no idea whether these are "acceptable" solutions, but I'd tend to use them in preference to the cryptography library, simply because they don't claim that the functions needed are "dangerous to use".

Paul