Those of you who have been following the pyuv and/or libuv libraries may have run into this at some point: “how do I use TLS with this”? pyuv provides something similar to a socket with a completion style interface, but it only does TCP. There is also the Poll handle, which can be used to use a regular Python socket with pyuv.

Of course, this second approach is the quickest/easiest in order to get TLS working, because the Python sockets already have TLS support thanks to the ssl module. I wanted to experiment with adding some sort of TLS handle, in the same fashion as the TCP handle, that is, not with regular Python sockets.

There are 2 main libraries providing TLS support (in general): OpenSSL and GnuTLS. What I basically wanted to do was encrypt/decrypt the data in memory and read/write it to a pyuv TCP handle. OpenSSL has this functionality through the BIO API, but I didn’t see anything similar in GnuTLS at a first glance so I went with OpenSSL.

I created a quick TLS handle with the ideas expressed above, it can be found in this gist.

It contains the TLS handle, example echo server and client and some sample certificates. Here is the client implementation sample, for the rest check the full gist.

[gist]https://gist.github.com/4599831[/gist]

It’s pretty basic, but I hope it serves as a starting point for using pyuv with TLS. I plan to analyze the performance compared to regular Python sockets in another blog post.

:wq