HTTPS Python client

Question

I have a tornado server that provide an https connection with a self signed certificate that I generated this way:

openssl genrsa -out privatekey.pem 1024                                         
openssl req -new -key privatekey.pem -out certrequest.csr 
openssl x509 -req -in certrequest.csr -signkey privatekey.pem -out certificate.pem

The code of the server is the following:

import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web
import tornado.httpserver
import os

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        print "new client "+str(self)
        self.write("Hello, world")

application = tornado.web.Application([
    (r"/", MainHandler),
])


http_server = tornado.httpserver.HTTPServer(application,
                                            ssl_options={
        "certfile": os.path.join("./", "certificate.pem"),
        "keyfile": os.path.join("./", "privatekey.pem"),

})

if __name__ == "__main__":
    http_server.listen(443)
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

I want to have a python client that connect to the server and check that the server is the right server (I guess through its certificate). For the moment I did a simple client like this:

import httplib
HOSTNAME='localhost'
conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection(HOSTNAME)
conn.putrequest('GET','/')
conn.endheaders()
response = conn.getresponse()
print response.read()

What would you suggest me to do (The client will later on be a mobile app I only use python for prototyping)?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you control the client side too (like in an android or iphone app) you can add your self-signed certificate to your trusted certificate store.

It is well explained here for an Android app