Using TLS in Twisted — Twisted 15.2.1 documentation
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# Using TLS in Twisted

## Overview

This document describes how to secure your communications using TLS (Transport Layer Security) — also known as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) — in Twisted servers and clients. It assumes that you know what TLS is, what some of the major reasons to use it are, and how to generate your own certificates. It also assumes that you are comfortable with creating TCP servers and clients as described in the server howto and client howto . After reading this document you should be able to create servers and clients that can use TLS to encrypt their connections, switch from using an unencrypted channel to an encrypted one mid-connection, and require client authentication.

Using TLS in Twisted requires that you have pyOpenSSL installed. A quick test to verify that you do is to run `from OpenSSL import SSL` at a python prompt and not get an error.

Twisted provides TLS support as a transport — that is, as an alternative to TCP. When using TLS, use of the TCP APIs you’re already familiar with, `TCP4ClientEndpoint` and `TCP4ServerEndpoint` — or `reactor.listenTCP` and `reactor.connectTCP` — is replaced by use of parallel TLS APIs (many of which still use the legacy name “SSL” due to age and/or compatibility with older APIs). To create a TLS server, use SSL4ServerEndpoint or listenSSL . To create a TLS client, use SSL4ClientEndpoint or connectSSL .

TLS provides transport layer security, but it’s important to understand what “security” means. With respect to TLS it means three things:

> 1. Identity: TLS servers (and sometimes clients) present a certificate, offering proof of who they are, so that you know who you are talking to.
> 2. Confidentiality: once you know who you are talking to, encryption of the connection ensures that the communications can’t be understood by any third parties who might be listening in.
> 3. Integrity: TLS checks the encrypted messages to ensure that they actually came from the party you originally authenticated to. If the messages fail these checks, then they are discarded and your application does not see them.

Without identity, neither confidentiality nor integrity is possible. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, then you might as easily be talking to your bank or to a thief who wants to steal your bank password. Each of the APIs listed above with “SSL” in the name requires a configuration object called (for historical reasons) a `contextFactory`. (Please pardon the somewhat awkward name.) The `contextFactory` serves three purposes:

> 1. It provides the materials to prove your own identity to the other side of the connection: in other words, who you are.
> 2. It expresses your requirements of the other side’s identity: in other words, who you would like to talk to (and who you trust to tell you that you’re talking to the right party).
> 3. It allows you to specify certain specialized options about the way the TLS protocol itself operates.

The requirements of clients and servers are slightly different. Both can provide a certificate to prove their identity, but commonly, TLS servers provide a certificate, whereas TLS clients check the server’s certificate (to make sure they’re talking to the right server) and then later identify themselves to the server some other way, often by offering a shared secret such as a password or API key via an application protocol secured with TLS and not as part of TLS itself.

Since these requirements are slightly different, there are different APIs to construct an appropriate `contextFactory` value for a client or a server.

For servers, we can use twisted.internet.ssl.CertificateOptions. In order to prove the server’s identity, you pass the `privateKey` and `certificate` arguments to this object. twisted.internet.ssl.PrivateCertificate.options is a convenient way to create a `CertificateOptions` instance configured to use a particular key and certificate.

For clients, we can use twisted.internet.ssl.optionsForClientTLS. This takes two arguments, `hostname` (which indicates what hostname must be advertised in the server’s certificate) and optionally `trustRoot`. By default, optionsForClientTLS tries to obtain the trust roots from your platform, but you can specify your own.

Note

Currently, Twisted only supports loading of OpenSSL’s default trust roots. If you’ve built OpenSSL yourself, you must take care to include these in the appropriate location. If you’re using the OpenSSL shipped as part of Mac OS X 10.5-10.9, this behavior will also be correct. If you’re using Debian, or one of its derivatives like Ubuntu, install the ca-certificates package to ensure you have trust roots available, and this behavior should also be correct. Work is ongoing to make platformTrust — the API that optionsForClientTLS uses by default — more robust. For example, platformTrust should fall back to the “certifi” package if no platform trust roots are available but it doesn’t do that yet. When this happens, you shouldn’t need to change your code.

## TLS echo server and client

Now that we’ve got the theory out of the way, let’s try some working examples of how to get started with a TLS server. The following examples rely on the files `server.pem` (private key and self-signed certificate together) and `public.pem` (the server’s public certificate by itself).

### TLS echo server

`echoserv_ssl.py`

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # Copyright (c) Twisted Matrix Laboratories.
    # See LICENSE for details.

    import sys

    from twisted.internet import ssl, protocol, task, defer
    from twisted.python import log
    from twisted.python.modules import getModule

    import echoserv

    def main(reactor):
        log.startLogging(sys.stdout)
        certData = getModule(__name__).filePath.sibling('server.pem').getContent()
        certificate = ssl.PrivateCertificate.loadPEM(certData)
        factory = protocol.Factory.forProtocol(echoserv.Echo)
        reactor.listenSSL(8000, factory, certificate.options())
        return defer.Deferred()

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        import echoserv_ssl
        task.react(echoserv_ssl.main)

This server uses listenSSL to listen for TLS traffic on port 8000, using the certificate and private key contained in the file `server.pem`. It uses the same echo example server as the TCP echo server — even going so far as to import its protocol class. Assuming that you can buy your own TLS certificate from a certificate authority, this is a fairly realistic TLS server.

### TLS echo client

`echoclient_ssl.py`

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # Copyright (c) Twisted Matrix Laboratories.
    # See LICENSE for details.

    from twisted.internet import ssl, task, protocol, endpoints, defer
    from twisted.python.modules import getModule

    import echoclient

    @defer.inlineCallbacks
    def main(reactor):
        factory = protocol.Factory.forProtocol(echoclient.EchoClient)
        certData = getModule(__name__).filePath.sibling('public.pem').getContent()
        authority = ssl.Certificate.loadPEM(certData)
        options = ssl.optionsForClientTLS(u'example.com', authority)
        endpoint = endpoints.SSL4ClientEndpoint(reactor, 'localhost', 8000,
                                                options)
        echoClient = yield endpoint.connect(factory)

        done = defer.Deferred()
        echoClient.connectionLost = lambda reason: done.callback(None)
        yield done

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        import echoclient_ssl
        task.react(echoclient_ssl.main)

This client uses SSL4ClientEndpoint to connect to `echoserv_ssl.py`. It also uses the same echo example client as the TCP echo client. Whenever you have a protocol that listens on plain-text TCP it is easy to run it over TLS instead. It specifies that it only wants to talk to a host named `"example.com"`, and that it trusts the certificate authority in `"public.pem"` to say who `"example.com"` is. Note that the host you are connecting to — localhost — and the host whose identity you are verifying — example.com — can differ. In this case, our example `server.pem` certificate identifies a host named “example.com”, but your server is proably running on localhost.

In a realistic client, it’s very important that you pass the same “hostname” your connection API (in this case, SSL4ClientEndpoint) and optionsForClientTLS. In this case we’re using “`localhost`” as the host to connect to because you’re probably running this example on your own computer and “`example.com`” because that’s the value hard-coded in the dummy certificate distributed along with Twisted’s example code.

### Connecting To Public Servers

Here is a short example, now using the default trust roots for optionsForClientTLS from platformTrust.

`check_server_certificate.py`

    from __future__ import print_function
    import sys
    from twisted.internet import defer, endpoints, protocol, ssl, task, error

    def main(reactor, host, port=443):
        options = ssl.optionsForClientTLS(hostname=host.decode('utf-8'))
        port = int(port)

        class ShowCertificate(protocol.Protocol):
            def connectionMade(self):
                self.transport.write(b"GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n")
                self.done = defer.Deferred()
            def dataReceived(self, data):
                certificate = ssl.Certificate(self.transport.getPeerCertificate())
                print("OK:", certificate)
                self.transport.abortConnection()
            def connectionLost(self, reason):
                print("Lost.")
                if not reason.check(error.ConnectionClosed):
                    print("BAD:", reason.value)
                self.done.callback(None)

        return endpoints.connectProtocol(
            endpoints.SSL4ClientEndpoint(reactor, host, port, options),
            ShowCertificate()
        ).addCallback(lambda protocol: protocol.done)

    task.react(main, sys.argv[1:])

You can use this tool fairly simply to retrieve certificates from an HTTPS server with a valid TLS certificate, by running it with a host name. For example:

    $ python check_server_certificate.py www.twistedmatrix.com
    OK: <Certificate Subject=www.twistedmatrix.com ...>
    $ python check_server_certificate.py www.cacert.org
    BAD: [(... 'certificate verify failed')]
    $ python check_server_certificate.py dornkirk.twistedmatrix.com
    BAD: No service reference ID could be validated against certificate.

Note

To properly validate your `hostname` parameter according to RFC6125, please also install the “service_identity” and “idna” packages from PyPI. Without this package, Twisted will currently make a conservative guess as to the correctness of the server’s certificate, but this will reject a large number of potentially valid certificates. service_identity implements the standard correctly and it will be a required dependency for TLS in a future release of Twisted.

## Using startTLS

If you want to switch from unencrypted to encrypted traffic mid-connection, you’ll need to turn on TLS with startTLS on both ends of the connection at the same time via some agreed-upon signal like the reception of a particular message. You can readily verify the switch to an encrypted channel by examining the packet payloads with a tool like Wireshark .

### startTLS server

`starttls_server.py`

    from twisted.internet import ssl, protocol, defer, task, endpoints
    from twisted.protocols.basic import LineReceiver
    from twisted.python.modules import getModule

    class TLSServer(LineReceiver):
        def lineReceived(self, line):
            print("received: " + line)
            if line == "STARTTLS":
                print("-- Switching to TLS")
                self.sendLine('READY')
                self.transport.startTLS(self.factory.options)

    def main(reactor):
        certData = getModule(__name__).filePath.sibling('server.pem').getContent()
        cert = ssl.PrivateCertificate.loadPEM(certData)
        factory = protocol.Factory.forProtocol(TLSServer)
        factory.options = cert.options()
        endpoint = endpoints.TCP4ServerEndpoint(reactor, 8000)
        endpoint.listen(factory)
        return defer.Deferred()

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        import starttls_server
        task.react(starttls_server.main)

### startTLS client

`starttls_client.py`

    from twisted.internet import ssl, endpoints, task, protocol, defer
    from twisted.protocols.basic import LineReceiver
    from twisted.python.modules import getModule

    class StartTLSClient(LineReceiver):
        def connectionMade(self):
            self.sendLine("plain text")
            self.sendLine("STARTTLS")

        def lineReceived(self, line):
            print("received: " + line)
            if line == "READY":
                self.transport.startTLS(self.factory.options)
                self.sendLine("secure text")
                self.transport.loseConnection()

    @defer.inlineCallbacks
    def main(reactor):
        factory = protocol.Factory.forProtocol(StartTLSClient)
        certData = getModule(__name__).filePath.sibling('server.pem').getContent()
        factory.options = ssl.optionsForClientTLS(
            u"example.com", ssl.PrivateCertificate.loadPEM(certData)
        )
        endpoint = endpoints.HostnameEndpoint(reactor, 'localhost', 8000)
        startTLSClient = yield endpoint.connect(factory)

        done = defer.Deferred()
        startTLSClient.connectionLost = lambda reason: done.callback(None)
        yield done

    if __name__ == "__main__":
        import starttls_client
        task.react(starttls_client.main)

`startTLS` is a transport method that gets passed a `contextFactory`. It is invoked at an agreed-upon time in the data reception method of the client and server protocols. The server uses `PrivateCertificate.options` to create a `contextFactory` which will use a particular certificate and private key (a common requirement for TLS servers).

The client creates an uncustomized `CertificateOptions` which is all that’s necessary for a TLS client to interact with a TLS server.

## Client authentication

Server and client-side changes to require client authentication fall largely under the dominion of pyOpenSSL, but few examples seem to exist on the web so for completeness a sample server and client are provided here.

### TLS server with client authentication via client certificate verification

When one or more certificates are passed to `PrivateCertificate.options`, the resulting `contextFactory` will use those certificates as trusted authorities and require that the peer present a certificate with a valid chain anchored by one of those authorities.

A server can use this to verify that a client provides a valid certificate signed by one of those certificate authorities; here is an example of such a certificate.

`ssl_clientauth_server.py`

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # Copyright (c) Twisted Matrix Laboratories.
    # See LICENSE for details.

    import sys

    from twisted.internet import ssl, protocol, task, defer
    from twisted.python import log
    from twisted.python.modules import getModule

    import echoserv

    def main(reactor):
        log.startLogging(sys.stdout)
        certData = getModule(__name__).filePath.sibling('public.pem').getContent()
        authData = getModule(__name__).filePath.sibling('server.pem').getContent()
        authority = ssl.Certificate.loadPEM(certData)
        certificate = ssl.PrivateCertificate.loadPEM(authData)
        factory = protocol.Factory.forProtocol(echoserv.Echo)
        reactor.listenSSL(8000, factory, certificate.options(authority))
        return defer.Deferred()

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        import ssl_clientauth_server
        task.react(ssl_clientauth_server.main)

### Client with certificates

The following client then supplies such a certificate as the `clientCertificate` argument to optionsForClientTLS, while still validating the server’s identity.

`ssl_clientauth_client.py`

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # Copyright (c) Twisted Matrix Laboratories.
    # See LICENSE for details.

    from twisted.internet import ssl, task, protocol, endpoints, defer
    from twisted.python.modules import getModule

    import echoclient

    @defer.inlineCallbacks
    def main(reactor):
        factory = protocol.Factory.forProtocol(echoclient.EchoClient)
        certData = getModule(__name__).filePath.sibling('public.pem').getContent()
        authData = getModule(__name__).filePath.sibling('server.pem').getContent()
        clientCertificate = ssl.PrivateCertificate.loadPEM(authData)
        authority = ssl.Certificate.loadPEM(certData)
        options = ssl.optionsForClientTLS(u'example.com', authority,
                                          clientCertificate)
        endpoint = endpoints.SSL4ClientEndpoint(reactor, 'localhost', 8000,
                                                options)
        echoClient = yield endpoint.connect(factory)

        done = defer.Deferred()
        echoClient.connectionLost = lambda reason: done.callback(None)
        yield done

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        import ssl_clientauth_client
        task.react(ssl_clientauth_client.main)

Notice that these two examples are very, very similar to the TLS echo examples above. In fact, you can demonstrate a failed authentication by simply running `echoclient_ssl.py` against `ssl_clientauth_server.py`; you’ll see no output because the server closed the connection rather than echoing the client’s authenticated input.

### TLS Protocol Options

For servers, it is desirable to offer Diffie-Hellman based key exchange that provides perfect forward secrecy. The ciphers are activated by default, however it is necessary to pass an instance of DiffieHellmanParameters to `CertificateOptions` via the `dhParameters` option to be able to use them.

For example,

    from twisted.internet.ssl import CertificateOptions, DiffieHellmanParameters
    from twisted.python.filepath import FilePath
    dhFilePath = FilePath('dh_param_1024.pem')
    dhParams = DiffieHellmanParameters.fromFile(dhFilePath)
    options = CertificateOptions(..., dhParameters=dhParams)

Another part of the TLS protocol which `CertificateOptions` can control is the version of the TLS or SSL protocol used. This is often called the context’s “method”. By default, `CertificateOptions` creates contexts that require at least the TLSv1 protocol. `CertificateOptions` also supports the older SSLv3 protocol (which may be required interoperate with an existing service or piece of software). To allow SSLv3, just pass `OpenSSL.SSL.SSLv3_METHOD` to `CertificateOptions`‘s initializer:

    from twisted.internet.ssl import CertificateOptions
    from OpenSSL.SSL import SSLv3_METHOD
    options = CertificateOptions(..., method=SSLv3_METHOD)

The somewhat confusingly-named `OpenSSL.SSL.SSLv23_METHOD` is also supported (to enable SSLv3 or better, based on negotiation). SSLv2 is insecure; it is explicitly not supported and will be disabled in all configurations.

Additionally, it is possible to limit the acceptable ciphers for your connection by passing an IAcceptableCiphers object to `CertificateOptions`. Since Twisted uses a secure cipher configuration by default, it is discouraged to do so unless absolutely necessary.

## Related facilities

twisted.protocols.amp supports encrypted connections and exposes a `startTLS` method one can use or subclass. twisted.web has built-in TLS support in its client , http , and xmlrpc modules.

## Conclusion

After reading through this tutorial, you should be able to:

- Use `listenSSL` and `connectSSL` to create servers and clients that use TLS
- Use `startTLS` to switch a channel from being unencrypted to using TLS mid-connection
- Add server and client support for client authentication