SSL All The Things In Python SSL All The Things In Python SSL All The Things In Python
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Network, PyCon, Security, Server, Talk

SSL All The Things In Python

PyCon AU 2016 -- Melbourne Kiwi PyCon 2016 -- Dunedin

Introduction

Following my DjangoCon US 2016 Talk I gave a talk at PyCon Australia in Melbourne and PyCon New Zealand in Dunedin.

Most of the slides from the former talk are the same. The major difference is the replacement of Django specifics with examples for a Python client and server implementation using the ssl standard library package.

How to use SSL in Python

Client Side

The client side of SSL connections is comparably easy as opposed to the server side. That doesn’t mean you can’t easily mess up things and make the entire encryption layer you intend to have useless. But what would security be without some danger, right 😉.

First of all you create a socket. That’s the normal Python socket layer. You then create a default SSL context which has all the best practices of the installed Python version. You can furthermore drop some protocols if you feel like it and your requirements allow for that. Next you wrap the socket into an SSL socket. While you do that, make sure you check the host name! And finally you connect to the server.

import socket, ssl

HOST, PORT = 'example.com', 443

def handle(conn):
    conn.write(b'GET / HTTP/1.1\n')
    print(conn.recv().decode())

def main():
    sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET)
    context = ssl.create_default_context(ssl.Purpose.SERVER_AUTH)
    context.options |= ssl.OP_NO_TLSv1 | ssl.OP_NO_TLSv1_1  # optional
    conn = context.wrap_socket(sock, server_hostname=HOST)
    try:
        conn.connect((HOST, PORT))
        handle(conn)
    finally:
        conn.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Server Side

The server side of SSL connections is more complicated and you can mess up much more. But let us start at the beginning.

You create a socket and bind it to an address and port. You, again, create a SSL default context for a server. The first thing you probably want to do is load the key, certificate and all intermediate certificates. You can put all of these into one file in that order. You can also provide them as separate arguments to the load_cert_chain() function. Again, you can exclude some protocols and update other context options based on your requirements. In the example we’re disabling TLS 1.0 and 1.1, because nobody needs them, right 😉. Lastly, you want to set a bunch of ciphers. That list comes from cipherli.st. Finally you start listening on the socket and wrap it with the SSL context for each connection.

import socket, ssl

HOST, PORT, CERT = 'example.com', 443, '/path/to/example.com.pem'

def handle(conn):
  print(conn.recv())
  conn.write(b'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n%s' % conn.getpeername()[0].encode())

def main():
  sock = socket.socket()
  sock.bind((HOST, PORT))
  sock.listen(5)
  context = ssl.create_default_context(ssl.Purpose.CLIENT_AUTH)
  context.load_cert_chain(certfile=CERT)  # 1. key, 2. cert, 3. intermediates
  context.options |= ssl.OP_NO_TLSv1 | ssl.OP_NO_TLSv1_1  # optional
  context.set_ciphers('EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH')
  while True:
    conn = None
    ssock, addr = sock.accept()
    try:
      conn = context.wrap_socket(ssock, server_side=True)
      handle(conn)
    except ssl.SSLError as e:
      print(e)
    finally:
      if conn:
        conn.close()
if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

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