Advanced Networking Examples

This directory contains some sample code related to SSL handshaking between different machines using different protocols and libraries. Please consult http://docs.python.org/library/ssl for important information concerning these examples.

Preliminaries

To do any kind of work with SSL you first need to have a set of public/private keypairs and a set of certificates. Generating the keys and certificates are outside the scope of Python. Consult documentation for OpenSSL or related package for more information.

For these examples, a set of keys and certificates have been made already:

• The privkeys/ directory contains three private keys for "acme", "guido", and "larry".
• The certs/ directory contains three signed certificates for "acme", "guido", and "larry".
• The ca/ directory contains information about the root certificate authority used to sign the certificates. The file ca/ca.crt is the certificate for the certificate authority.

Example 1 : A Simple SSL Server/Client

An example of an SSL server that presents a signed certificate to clients. The client code verifies the server identity using the certificate authority (CA) certificate.

• ssl_server1.py
• ssl_client1.py

Example 2 : A SSL Server/Client with paired certificates

An example of an SSL server that requires clients to present certificates that are verified against a trusted certificate authority.

• ssl_server2.py
• ssl_client2.py

Example 3 : An SSL XML-RPC Server with paired certificates

An example of creating an XML-RPC server that uses SSL and requires clients to present certificates signed by a trusted certificate authority.

• ssl_xmlrpc_server.py
• ssl_xmlrpc_client.py

Example 4: An SSL Web Server with paired certificates

An example of creating an HTTP server that uses SSL as well as using urllib2 to provide client certificates.

• ssl_http_serv.py
• ssl_urllib.py

If you try to connect to this server using a normal web browser at https://localhost:8080, you should get an error message rejecting the connection due to bad certicates. The only to connect is to present a certificate as shown in the ssl_urllib.py code.