[Distutils] Disabling non HTTPS access to APIs on PyPI

[Nate Coraor]

Heads up to anyone running pypiserver, this breaks the default redirection
from pypiserver to PyPI. There's an open issue[1] to fix it. In the
meantime, you can use the pypiserver option `--fallback-url
https://pypi.python.org/simple/` to work around it.

--nate

[1] https://github.com/pypiserver/pypiserver/issues/179

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> Historically PyPI was only available over either HTTP or unvalidated
> HTTPS, and over time we’ve been pushing more and more traffic onto HTTPS.
> In Warehouse the decision was made to *not* redirect “API” URLs from HTTP
> to HTTPS, but to rather return an error accessing them from HTTP. This is
> because while logged in views have HSTS to ensure HTTPS in the browser (and
> with humans manually entering them into the URL bar regularly they are more
> error prone) APIs which are typically accessed by automated clients with an
> URL configured or hardcoded typically do not respect HSTS, so if you had a
> script that did ``curl http://pypi.python.org/simple/``, it would
> silently get redirects to https and appear to “work”, but you wouldn’t get
> any of the security properties of TLS because an attacker would just
> intercept the request prior to the redirect happening.
>
> Today I’ve backported this changed to the current production deployment of
> PyPI, which means that you can no longer access /simple/ and /packages/
> over HTTP and you will have to directly go to HTTPS. For most people this
> should have no effect, because most tooling should be defaulting to HTTPS
> anyways, however if you’re using a significantly old version of tooling, it
> may still be defaulting to the HTTP url and will now stop functioning.
>
> The recommended remediation is to upgrade your tooling to versions that
> support verified TLS connections and which default to the proper HTTPS URLs.
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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