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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Sep 1 23:31:44 CEST 2014

On 2 Sep 2014 03:08, "Donald Stufft" <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

On Sep 1, 2014, at 1:01 PM, Christian Heimes <christian at python.org> wrote: On 01.09.2014 17:35, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Oh, now I get what you mean - yes, sitecustomize already poses the same kind of problem as the proposed sslcustomize (hence the existence of the related command line options). If an attacker is able to place a module like sitecustomize.py in an import directory or any .pth file in a site-packages directory than this Python installation is compromised. .pth files are insidious because they are always loaded and their code is always executed. I don't see how sslcustomize is going to make a difference here. Right, this is the point I was trying to make. If you’ve installed a malicious package it’s game over. There’s nothing Python can do to help you.

Yes, that's what I said originally when pointing out that isolated mode and the switch to disable site module processing would need to disable sslcustomize processing as well.

Antoine was replying to a side comment about it being tricky to shadow stdlib modules. I left out the qualifier "directly" in my original comment, and he left out "indirectly through sitecustomize" in his initial reply, so we were talking past each for a while.

Cheers, Nick.

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