Python, pickling, events, and security

[Robert Olson]

The following is in PEP 307:

     We firmly believe that, on the Internet, it is better to know that
     you are using an insecure protocol than to trust a protocol to be
     secure whose implementation hasn't been thoroughly checked.  Even
     high quality implementations of widely used protocols are
     routinely found flawed; Python's pickle implementation simply
     cannot make such guarantees without a much larger time investment.
     Therefore, as of Python 2.3, all safety checks on unpickling are
     officially removed, and replaced with this warning:

       *** Do not unpickle data received from an untrusted or
           unauthenticated source ***

     The same warning applies to previous Python versions, despite the
     presence of safety checks there.

The current event services uses pickled python objects as the wire 
protocol. The above warning makes me believe that we should look seriously 
at replacing that, perhaps in the just-post-2.1 timeframe.

--bob