full-disclosure - Re: Python ssl handling could be better...

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Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:57:18 +1100
From: dave b <db.pub.mail@...il.com>
To: bk <chort0@...il.com>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk, security@...hon.org
Subject: Re: Python ssl handling could be better...

On 27 February 2011 18:36, bk <chort0@...il.com> wrote:
> On Nov 14, 2010, at 8:54 AM, dave b wrote:
>
>> Just when you thought it couldn't get worse...
>>
>> http://bugs.python.org/issue3596
>> http://bugs.python.org/issue4870
>
> As a follow-up to this, I recently started working with the python-twitter library (http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/) that makes use of urllib2 for HTTPS requests, which in turn relies on httplib (that is shipped with Python).  Auditing all the way back down the stack of objects I didn't notice any parameters that override the defaults to require certificate verification, and in fact the ssl library for Python 2.6.5 (which is the latest on OpenBSD at least) does no verification of the server's cert by default.  I checked the page for httplib (http://docs.python.org/library/httplib) to see if I could pass a parameter to override the default (insane) behavior and found this helpful message: Warning This does not do any verification of the server’s certificate.
>
> So anyone using Python's built-in httplib (usually via urllib2) is screwed.
>
> You can't say you weren't warned (even Facebook has heard of Firesheep, there's no excuse).

The behaviour isn't that insane. While some of us disagree with it the
python developers are correct in saying that changing this behaviour
(by default) will break stuff.

Also thanks to some awesome work by Antoine Pitrou [0]
in python3.2   -->  "http.client.HTTPSConnection,
urllib.request.HTTPSHandler and
urllib.request.urlopen now take optional arguments to allow for
server certificate checking, as recommended in public uses of HTTPS. "

[0] - http://code.python.org/hg/branches/py3k/rev/86f97255bfc8

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