# Motivation for asteval¶

The asteval module provides a means to evaluate a large subset of the Python language from within a python program, without using eval(). It is, in effect, a restricted version of Python's built-in eval(), forbidding several actions, and using using a simple dictionary as a flat namespace. A completely fair question is: Why on earth would anyone do this? That is, why not simply use eval(), or just use Python itself?

The short answer is that sometimes you want to allow evaluation of user input, or expose a simple calculator inside a larger application. For this, eval() is pretty scary, as it exposes all of Python, which can make user input difficult to trust. Since asteval does not support the import statement (or many other constructs), user code cannot access the os and sys modules or any functions or classes outside the provided symbol table.

Other missing features (modules, classes, lambda, yield, generators) are similarly motivated. The idea for asteval is to make a simple procedural, mathematically-oriented language that can be embedded safely into larger applications.

In fact, the asteval module grew out the the need for a simple expression evaluator for scientific applications such as the lmfit and xraylarch modules. A first attempt using the pyparsing module worked but was error-prone and difficult to maintain. It turned out that using the Python ast module is so easy that adding more complex programming constructs like conditionals, loops, exception handling, complex assignment and slicing, and even user-defined functions was fairly simple to implement. Importantly, because parsing is done by the ast module, whole classes of implementation errors disappear. Valid python expression will be parsed correctly and converted into an Abstract Syntax Tree. Furthermore, the resulting AST is easy to walk through, greatly simplifying evaluation over any other approach. What started as a desire for a simple expression evaluator grew into a quite useable procedural domain-specific language for mathematical applications.

Asteval makes no claims about speed. Obviously, evaluating the ast tree involves a lot of function calls, and will likely be slower than Python. In preliminary tests, it's about 4x slower than Python.

## How Safe is asteval?¶

I'll be completely honest: I don't know.

If you're looking for guarantees that malicious code cannot ever cause damage, you're definitely looking in the wrong place. I don't suggest that asteval is completely safe, only that it is safer than the builtin eval(), and that you might find it useful.

For why eval() is dangerous, see, for example Eval is really dangerous and the comments and links therein. Clearly, making eval() perfectly safe from malicious user input is a difficult prospect. Basically, if one can cause Python to seg-fault, safety cannot be guaranteed.

Asteval is meant to be safer than the builtin eval(), and does try to avoid any known exploits. Many actions are not allowed from the asteval interpreter, including:

In addition (and following the discussion in the link above), the following attributes are blacklisted for all objects, and cannot be accessed:

__subclasses__, __bases__, __globals__, __code__, __closure__, __func__, __self__, __module__, __dict__, __class__, __call__, __get__, __getattribute__, __subclasshook__, __new__, __init__, func_globals, func_code, func_closure, im_class, im_func, im_self, gi_code, gi_frame

Of course, this approach of making a blacklist cannot be guaranteed to be complete, but it does eliminate classes of attacks to seg-fault the Python interpreter. On the other hand, asteval will typically expose numpy ufuncs from the numpy module, and several of these can seg-fault Python without too much trouble. If you're paranoid about safe user input that can never cause a segmentation fault, you'll want to disable the use of numpy.

There are important categories of safety that asteval does not even attempt to address. The most important of these is resource hogging. There is no guaranteed timeout on any calculation, and so a reasonable looking calculation such as:

>>> from asteval import Interpreter
>>> aeval = Interpreter()
>>> txt = """nmax = 1e8
... a = sqrt(arange(nmax))
... """
>>> aeval.eval(txt)


can take a noticeable amount of CPU time. It it not hard to come up with short program that would run for hundreds of years, which probably exceeds your threshold for an acceptable run-time.

Nevertheless, you may try to limit the recursion limit when executing expressions, with a code like this:

import contextlib

@contextlib.contextmanager
def limited_recursion(recursion_limit):
old_limit = sys.getrecursionlimit()
sys.setrecursionlimit(recursion_limit)
try:
yield
finally:
sys.setrecursionlimit(old_limit)

with limited_recursion(100):
Interpreter().eval(...)


In summary, there are many ways that asteval could be considered part of an un-safe programming environment. Recommendations for how to improve this situation would be greatly appreciated.