Question

I have a password string that must be passed to a method. Everything works fine but I don’t feel comfortable storing the password in clear text. Is there a way to obfuscate the string or to truly encrypt it? I’m aware that obfuscation can be reverse engineered, but I think I should at least try to cover up the password a bit. At the very least it wont be visible to a indexing program, or a stray eye giving a quick look at my code.

I am aware of pyobfuscate but I don’t want the whole program obfuscated, just one string and possibly the whole line itself where the variable is defined.

Target platform is GNU Linux Generic (If that makes a difference)

Answer 1

If you just want to prevent casually glancing at a password, you may want to consider encoding/decoding the password to/from base64. It’s not secure in the least, but the password won’t be casually human/robot readable.

import base64
# Encode password (must be bytes type)
encoded_pw = base64.b64encode(raw_pw)

# Decode password (must be bytes type)
decoded_pw = base64.b64decode(encoded_pw)