backports.ssl_match_hostname 3.2a3

The Secure Sockets layer is only actually secure if you check the hostname in the certificate returned by the server to which you are connecting, and verify that it matches to hostname that you are trying to reach.

But the matching logic, defined in RFC2818, can be a bit tricky to implement on your own. So the ssl package in the Standard Library of Python 3.2 now includes a match_hostname() function for performing this check instead of requiring every application to implement the check separately.

This backport brings match_hostname() to users of earlier versions of Python. Simply make this distribution a dependency of your package, and then use it like this:

from backports.ssl_match_hostname import match_hostname, CertificateError
...
sslsock = ssl.wrap_socket(sock, ssl_version=ssl.PROTOCOL_SSLv3,
                          cert_reqs=ssl.CERT_REQUIRED, ca_certs=...)
try:
    match_hostname(sslsock.getpeercert(), hostname)
except CertificateError, ce:
    ...

Note that the ssl module is only included in the Standard Library for Python 2.6 and later; users of Python 2.5 or earlier versions will also need to install the ssl distribution from the Python Package Index to use code like that shown above.

Brandon Craig Rhodes is merely the packager of this distribution; the actual code inside comes verbatim from Python 3.2.