What is the secrets.token_bytes() function in Python?

Functions to generate secure tokens that are suitable for applications such as password resets, hard-to-guess URLs, and so on are some of the features provided by the secrets module in Python.

The secrets.token_bytes() function in the secrets module is used to generate a random byte-string that contains a given number of bytes.

The secrets module is a comparatively new module that was introduced in Python 3.6. The secrets module generates cryptographically strong random numbers that can be used to generate security tokens, passwords, account authentication, etc.

Parameters

The secrets.token_bytes() function accepts a positive numeric value that denotes the number of bytes to generate. If no value is provided, a dynamic default value is used.

Return value

The secrets.token_bytes() function returns the randomly generated byte-string of the specified number of bytes.

Code

Let’s take a look at the code.

# Importing the secrets module
import secrets 
# Creating tokens
token1 = secrets.token_bytes() 
token2 = secrets.token_bytes(10) 
# Printing tokens
print(token1) 
print(token2)

Explanation

  • In line 2, we import the secrets module.

  • In line 5, we create the first token with no provided attribute.

  • In line 6, we create the second token with byte size 10.

  • In lines 9 and 10, we print the output, which we get as proper encrypted code.

In this way, we can generate cryptographically secured byte strings of variable length using the secrets.token_bytes() function in Python.

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