Don't use == for comparing secrets

TIL: You shouldn't use == to compare HMACs, or anything sensitive really. Doing so creates a timing side channel that can reveal the secret to an attacker. Instead you need to use a comparison function that takes a constant amount of time for all values, not matter how similar they are to the actual HMAC. The python example given in the article is:

def is_equal(a, b):
  if len(a) != len(b):
      return False

  result = 0
  for x, y in zip(a, b):
      result |= x ^ y
  return result == 0

This function is available in python 3.3+ as:

hmac.compare_digest(a, b)