Having coded for a long time and in a relatively large number of languages, I was a little panicky to realize that Python doesn’t have private variables and/or methods.
Some Context
When I came across this fact, I was trying to write an iPython notebook for use by others. You really can’t secure things in iPython as users have access to execute arbitrary code, but I thought that you could at least make it relatively hard to break by storing things in a module and loading them. But even this doesn’t work because nothing is private in Python – a user could just interrogate my classes and get right to the connection information variable (even if they had little to no knowledge of programming).
In Java, you can technically get around private variables by cracking open classes with reflection… but non-technical people wouldn’t know that and most programmers wouldn’t bother. The entry bar in Python is a lot lower unfortunately.
What Does Python Do Instead?
This stack overflow post says the following which helps shed some light on the situation.
It’s cultural. In Python, you don’t write to other classes’ instance or class variables. In Java, nothing prevents you from doing the same if you really want to – after all, you can always edit the source of the class itself to achieve the same effect. Python drops that pretence of security and encourages programmers to be responsible. In practice, this works very nicely.
If you want to emulate private variables for some reason, you can always use the __ prefix from PEP 8. Python mangles the names of variables like __foo so that they’re not easily visible to code outside the class that contains them (although you can get around it if you’re determined enough, just like you can get around Java’s protections if you work at it).
By the same convention, the _ prefix means stay away even if you’re not technically prevented from doing so. You don’t play around with another class’s variables that look like __foo or _bar.
So… basically, python’s style guide, PEP-8, suggests using “_xyz” for internal identifiers and “__xyz ” (with 2 underscores) for private identifiers. Private identifiers will be name-mangled outside the module, so people won’t know what they’re using… but they’re not really private. People can still probe around, find them, and use them if they are determined.
Again, in Java you could go use reflection to crack open a private class… so while I’m a little annoyed at this in Python, it is true that it’s not really terribly different from a real security standpoint.
Final Thoughts
So… it seems that if you want to use real secrets (like database connection details), you have to put them in a separate application on a separate server behind an API. That way the user (especially in an iPython context) is completely decoupled from the information as a whole.
Coding Stream of Consciousness 