New submission from Maximilian Blochberger:

I have the following scenario: Client → Proxy → Target.

The following two scenarios are working perfectly fine:

1) Establishing a TLS-secured connection to the proxy and then tunnel traffic 
through that connection to the target. This results in the proxy being able to 
observe and manipulate the traffic in both directions. It protects against an 
adversary who has no control over the proxy, e.g. it prevents observers from 
learning that you are using a proxy (if the IP/port is not known) and from 
reading the actual traffic.

2) Establish a non-secured connection to the proxy and then tunnel TLS-secured 
traffic through that connection to the target. That prevents the proxy from 
being able to observe or manipulate the traffic. Although an observer could 
learn that you are using a proxy and what target you are connecting to.

Now what I tried was to establish a TLS-secured connection to the proxy and 
then to establish a TLS-secured tunnel to the target, effectively resulting in 
two layers of TLS in between the client and the proxy. This would protect from 
an observer learning that you are using a proxy and where you connect to (the 
proxy still knows) but preventing the proxy from observing and manipulating the 
actual traffic to the target.

This does not work in Python 3.6. The TLS-secured connection to the proxy is 
straight forward and can be easily done with ssl.SSLContext.wrap_socket(). The 
TCP connection between the proxy and the target can then be established by 
issuing an HTTP CONNECT request. The response can than be read without closing 
the connection as done in http.client.HTTPConnection._tunnel(). Now my idea was 
to call ssl.SSLContext.wrap_socket() again (with a different context for the 
target) and send traffic through that. Unfortunately the TLS handshake fails 
with the error message "unknown protocol". I looked into the actual traffic 
transmitted and realised that the handshake was performed in plain text – so 
effectively stripping the TLS layer that was established already – which 
results in the proxy server not knowing how to handle the traffic (as it is not 
TLS-secured) aborting the connection (and reporting a fatal TLS alert).

This leads to the conclusion that another call to ssl.SSLContext.wrap_socket() 
will override a previous call of the same function (different context object 
though). I think this is unexpected behaviour.

It might be easier to handle such scenarios if a tunnel would be a separate 
http.client.HTTP(S)Connection object, see issue #24964. This would also allow 
to handle ssl-specific calls such as ssl.SSLSocket.getpeercert() as each layer 
probably uses different certificates.

----------
assignee: christian.heimes
components: SSL
messages: 286517
nosy: Maximilian Blochberger, christian.heimes
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Cannot tunnel TLS connection through TLS connection
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.6

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue29394>
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