[Python-Dev] PEP 476: Enabling certificate validation by default! (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou antoine at python.org
Sun Aug 31 19:29:38 CEST 2014

Le 31/08/2014 19:03, Paul Moore a écrit :

On 31 August 2014 17:27, Christian Heimes <christian at python.org> wrote:

It's very simple to trust a self-signed certificate: just download it and stuff it into the trust store. "Stuff it into the trust store" is the hard bit, though. I have honestly no idea how to do that.

You certainly shouldn't do so. If an application has special needs that require trusting a self-signed certificate, then it should expose a configuration setting to let users specify the cert's location. Stuffing self-signed certs into the system trust store is really a measure of last resort.

There's another case which isn't solved by this, though, which is when a cert is invalid. The common situation being that it has expired (renewing certs is a PITA and therefore expired certs are more common than it sounds they should be). In this case, there is no way to whitelist it: you have to disable certificate checking altogether. This can be exposed by the application as configuration option if necessary, as well.

Regards

Antoine.

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