""" There is a way to put keys of any type in a type's dictionary. I think this allows various kinds of crashes, but so far I have only found a convoluted attack of _PyType_Lookup(), which uses the mro of the type without holding a strong reference to it. Probably works with super.__getattribute__() too, which uses the same kind of code. """ class MyKey(object): def __hash__(self): return hash('mykey') def __cmp__(self, other): # the following line decrefs the previous X.__mro__ X.__bases__ = (Base2,) # trash all tuples of length 3, to make sure that the items of # the previous X.__mro__ are really garbage z = [] for i in range(1000): z.append((i, None, None)) return -1 class Base(object): mykey = 'from Base' class Base2(object): mykey = 'from Base2' # you can't add a non-string key to X.__dict__, but it can be # there from the beginning :-) X = type('X', (Base,), {MyKey(): 5}) print X.mykey # I get a segfault, or a slightly wrong assertion error in a debug build.