asyncio-upgradeable-streams

An experiment in upgradeable streams.

Overview

An upgradeable stream starts life as a plain socket connection, but is capable of being "upgraded" to TLS. This is sometimes known as STARTTLS. Common examples of this are SMTP, LDAP, and HTTP proxy tunneling with CONNECT.

The asyncio library provides loop.start_tls for this purpose, however there is little information on how this can be used.

This project provides an implementation of asyncio.open_connection and asyncio.start_server with an extra optional boolean parameter upgradeadble. When this is set the TLS negotiation is deferred, and the writer has a new method start_tls which can be called to upgrade the connection to TLS.

This was tested using Python 3.9.7 on Ubuntu Linux 21.10.

Issues

The solution makes use of private variables in the python standard library which may change at the will of the python library maintainer. In particular it has to reset the reader in the StreamReaderProtocol and the transport in the StreamWriter.

Installation

This can be installed with pip.

pip install jetblack-upgradeable-streams

Examples

The following examples can be found in the "demos" folder. They expect a Linux environment.

Client

A new argument upgradeable has been added to the open_connection function to enable upgrading. When upgradeable is True the TLS negotiation is deferred and the ssl parameter is stored for use when the connection is upgraded. The writer has a new method start_tls to upgrade the connection to TLS.

1. The client connects without TLS.

2. First the client sends "PING" to the server. The server should respond with "PONG".

3. Next the client sends "STARTTLS" to instruct the server to upgrade the connection to TLS. The client then calls the start_tls method on the writer to negotiate the secure connection. The method returns a new reader and writer.

4. Using the new writer the client sends "PING" to the server, this time over the encrypted stream. The server should respond with "PONG".

5. Finally the client sends "QUIT" to the server and closes the connection.

import asyncio
import socket
import ssl

from upgradeable_streams import open_connection


async def start_client():
    ctx = ssl.create_default_context(
        purpose=ssl.Purpose.SERVER_AUTH,
        cafile='/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt'
    )
    host = socket.getfqdn()

    print("Connect to server as upgradeable")
    reader, writer = await open_connection(
        host,
        10001,
        ssl=ctx,
        upgradeable=True
    )

    print(f"The writer ssl context is {writer.get_extra_info('sslcontext')}")

    print("Sending PING")
    writer.write(b'PING\n')
    response = (await reader.readline()).decode('utf-8').rstrip()
    print(f"Received: {response}")

    print("Sending STARTTLS")
    writer.write(b'STARTTLS\n')

    print("Upgrading the connection")
    # Upgrade
    reader, writer = await writer.start_tls()

    print(f"The writer ssl context is {writer.get_extra_info('sslcontext')}")

    print("Sending PING")
    writer.write(b'PING\n')
    response = (await reader.readline()).decode('utf-8').rstrip()
    print(f"Received: {response}")

    print("Sending QUIT")
    writer.write(b'QUIT\n')
    await writer.drain()

    print("Closing client")
    writer.close()
    await writer.wait_closed()
    print("Client disconnected")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    asyncio.run(start_client())

Server

An extra argument upgradeable has been added to the start_server function to enable upgrading to TLS. The ssl context is stored for use when a client connection is upgraded to TLS. The writer has a new method start_tls to upgrade the connection to TLS.

1. The server listens for client connections.

2. On receiving a connection it enters a read loop.

3. When the server receives "PING" it responds with "PONG".

4. When the server receives "STARTTLS" it calls the start_tls method on the writer to negotiate the TLS connection. The method returns a new reader and writer.

5. When the server receives "QUIT" it closes the connection.

The code expects certificate and key PEM files in "~/.keys/server.{crt,key}".

import asyncio
from asyncio import StreamReader, StreamWriter
from os.path import expanduser
import socket
import ssl
from typing import Union

from upgradeable_streams import start_server, UpgradeableStreamWriter


async def handle_client(
        reader: StreamReader,
        writer: Union[UpgradeableStreamWriter, StreamWriter]
) -> None:
    print("Client connected")

    while True:
        request = (await reader.readline()).decode('utf8').rstrip()
        print(f"Read '{request}'")

        if request == 'QUIT':
            break

        elif request == 'PING':
            print("Sending pong")
            writer.write(b'PONG\n')
            await writer.drain()

        elif request == 'STARTTLS':
            if not isinstance(writer, UpgradeableStreamWriter):
                raise ValueError('writer not upgradeable')
            print("Upgrading connection to TLS")
            # Upgrade
            reader, writer = await writer.start_tls()

    print("Closing client")
    writer.close()
    await writer.wait_closed()
    print("Client closed")


async def run_server():
    ctx = ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_TLS_SERVER)
    ctx.load_verify_locations(cafile="/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt")
    ctx.load_cert_chain(
        expanduser("~/.keys/server.crt"),
        expanduser("~/.keys/server.key")
    )
    host = socket.getfqdn()

    print("Starting server as upgradeable")
    server = await start_server(
        handle_client,
        host,
        10001,
        ssl=ctx,
        upgradeable=True
    )

    async with server:
        await server.serve_forever()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    asyncio.run(run_server())

Development

Pull requests are welcome. In particular anything to reduce the reliance on the implementation details in the standard library.