How to fix "ImportError: cannot import name _AES" from Crypto.Cipher

Question

I'm using the pycrypto module to encrypt files. When running the python code, it works well:

$ python encrypt_file.py file

but when I build encrypt_file.py to a binary:

$ pyinstaller -F zip_disk.py

and run the binary under dist

$ ./encrypt_file file

it shows the following error:

File "<string>", line 24, in <module>
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyInstaller-2.1-py2.7.egg/PyInstaller/loader/pyi_importers.py", line 270, in load_module
exec(bytecode, module.__dict__)
File "/home/xxxx/zip_disk/build/zip_disk/out00-PYZ.pyz/Crypto.Cipher.AES", line 50, in <module>
ImportError: cannot import name _AES

Why does this happen?
How to fix ImportError?

• My import statement is

  from Crypto.Cipher import AES
  

• Python version: Python 2.7.6
• PyCrypto version is 2.6.1. I have tried to install pycrypto from source and via pip, both result in the the same ImportError.
• Platform: Linux Ubuntu 3.13.0-32-generic x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Answer 1

The pycrypto developers have stopped futher upgrades. Use instead pycryptodome which replaces pycrypto.

pip install pycryptodome

Now it works fine (did for me)!