The old socket.ssl() support for TLS over sockets is being superseded in Python 2.6 by a new 'ssl' module. This package brings that module to older Python releases, 2.3.5 and up (it may also work on older versions of 2.3, but we haven't tried it).
It's quite similar to the 2.6 ssl module. There's no stand-alone documentation for this package; instead, just use the development branch documentation for the SSL module at http://docs.python.org/dev/library/ssl.html.
Version 1.0 had a problem with Python 2.5.1 -- the structure of the socket object changed from earlier versions.
Version 1.1 was missing various package metadata information.
Version 1.2 added more package metadata, and support for ssl.get_server_certificate(), and the PEM-to-DER encode/decode routines. Plus integrated Paul Moore's patch to setup.py for Windows. Plus added support for asyncore, and asyncore HTTPS server test.
Version 1.3 fixed a bug in the test suite.
Version 1.4 incorporated use of -static switch.
Version 1.5 fixed bug in Python version check affecting build on Python 2.5.0.
Version 1.7 (and 1.6) fixed some bugs with asyncore support (recv and send not being called on the SSLSocket class, wrong semantics for sendall).
Version 1.8 incorporated some code from Chris Stawarz to handle sockets which are set to non-blocking before negotiating the SSL session.
Version 1.9 makes ssl.SSLError a subtype of socket.error.
Version 1.10 fixes a bug in sendall().
Version 1.11 includes the MANIFEST file, and by default will turne unexpected EOFs occurring during a read into a regular EOF. It also removes the code for SSLFileStream, to use the regular socket module's _fileobject instead.
Version 1.12 fixes the bug in SSLSocket.accept() reported by Georg Brandl, and adds a test case for that fix.
Version 1.13 fixes a bug in calling do_handshake() automatically on non-blocking sockets. Thanks to Giampaolo Rodola. Now includes real asyncore test case.
Version 1.14 incorporates some fixes to naming (rename "recv_from" to "recvfrom" and "send_to" to "sendto"), and a fix to the asyncore test case to unregister the connection handler when the connection is closed. It also exposes the SSL shutdown via the "unwrap" method on an SSLSocket. It exposes "subjectPublicKey" in the data received from a peer cert.
Version 1.15 fixes a bug in write retries, where the output buffer has changed location because of garbage collection during the interim. It also provides the new flag, PROTOCOL_NOSSLv2, which selects SSL23, but disallows actual use of SSL2.
Version 1.16 removes installing tests system-wide (which fixes the
"permission denied" error when installing in virtualenvs), adds
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu and /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu to the
search path (which fixes compilation on ubuntu 12.04) and stopped using
SSLv2_method if it's not present. Many thanks to Denis Bilenko
for providing those fixes through his temporary sslfix fork.
The package is now maintained (bugfix only) by PyPA.
Authorship: A cast of dozens over the years have written the Python SSL support, including Marc-Alan Lemburg, Robin Dunn, GvR, Kalle Svensson, Skip Montanaro, Mark Hammond, Martin von Loewis, Jeremy Hylton, Andrew Kuchling, Georg Brandl, Bill Janssen, Chris Stawarz, Neal Norwitz, and many others. Thanks to Paul Moore, David Bolen and Mark Hammond for help with the Windows side of the house. And it's all based on OpenSSL, which has its own cast of dozens!
To install it, run:
pip install ssl
or download it from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ssl
Feel free to report issues at https://github.com/pypa/ssl/issues