ssl.SSLError: tlsv1 alert protocol version

I believe TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION is alerting you that the server doesn’t want to talk TLS v1.0 to you. Try to specify TLS v1.2 only by sticking in these lines:

import ssl
from http.client import HTTPSConnection
context = ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1_2)

# Create HTTPS connection
c = HTTPSConnection("0.0.0.0", context=context)

Note, you may need sufficiently new versions of Python (2.7.9+ perhaps?) and possibly OpenSSL (I have "OpenSSL 1.0.2k 26 Jan 2017" and the above seems to work, YMMV)

None of the accepted answers pointed me in the right direction, and this is still the question that comes up when searching the topic, so here’s my (partially) successful saga.

Background: I run a Python script on a Beaglebone Black that polls the cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex using the python-poloniex library. It suddenly stopped working with the TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION error.

Turns out that OpenSSL was fine, and trying to force a v1.2 connection was a huge wild goose chase – the library will use the latest version as necessary. The weak link in the chain was actually Python, which only defined ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1_2, and therefore started supporting TLS v1.2, since version 3.4.

Meanwhile, the version of Debian on the Beaglebone considers Python 3.3 the latest. The workaround I used was to install Python 3.5 from source (3.4 might have eventually worked too, but after hours of trial and error I’m done):

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
sudo apt-get install libreadline-gplv2-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev libbz2-dev
wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.5.4/Python-3.5.4.tgz
sudo tar xzf Python-3.5.4.tgz
cd Python-3.5.4
./configure
sudo make altinstall

Maybe not all those packages are strictly necessary, but installing them all at once saves a bunch of retries. The altinstall prevents the install from clobbering existing python binaries, installing as python3.5 instead, though that does mean you have to re-install additional libraries. The ./configure took a good five or ten minutes. The make took a couple of hours.

Now this still didn’t work until I finally ran

sudo -H pip3.5 install requests[security]

Which also installs pyOpenSSL, cryptography and idna. I suspect pyOpenSSL was the key, so maybe pip3.5 install -U pyopenssl would have been sufficient but I’ve spent far too long on this already to make sure.

So in summary, if you get TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION error in Python, it’s probably because you can’t support TLS v1.2. To add support, you need at least the following:

• OpenSSL 1.0.1
• Python 3.4
• requests[security]

This has got me past TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION, and now I get to battle with SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO instead.

Turns out this is back to the original issue of Python selecting the wrong SSL version. This can be confirmed by using this trick to mount a requests session with ssl_version=ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1_2. Without it, SSLv23 is used and the SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO error appears. With it, the request succeeds.

The final battle was to force TLSv1_2 to be picked when the request is made deep within a third party library. Both this method and this method ought to have done the trick, but neither made any difference. My final solution is horrible, but effective. I edited /usr/local/lib/python3.5/site-packages/urllib3/util/ssl_.py and changed

def resolve_ssl_version(candidate):
    """
    like resolve_cert_reqs
    """
    if candidate is None:
        return PROTOCOL_SSLv23

    if isinstance(candidate, str):
        res = getattr(ssl, candidate, None)
        if res is None:
            res = getattr(ssl, 'PROTOCOL_' + candidate)
        return res

    return candidate

to

def resolve_ssl_version(candidate):
    """
    like resolve_cert_reqs
    """
    if candidate is None:
        return ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1_2

    if isinstance(candidate, str):
        res = getattr(ssl, candidate, None)
        if res is None:
            res = getattr(ssl, 'PROTOCOL_' + candidate)
        return res

    return candidate

and voila, my script can finally contact the server again.

The only thing you have to do is to install requests[security] in your virtualenv. You should not have to use Python 3 (it should work in Python 2.7). Moreover, if you are using a recent version of macOS, you don’t have to use homebrew to separately install OpenSSL either.

$ virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python tempenv  # uses system python
$ . tempenv/bin/activate
$ pip install requests
$ python
>>> import ssl
>>> ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION
'OpenSSL 0.9.8zh 14 Jan 2016'  # this is the built-in openssl
>>> import requests
>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs')
requests.exceptions.SSLError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='api.github.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /users/octocat/orgs (Caused by SSLError(SSLError(1, u'[SSL: TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION] tlsv1 alert protocol version (_ssl.c:590)'),))
$ pip install 'requests[security]'
$ python  # install requests[security] and try again
>>> import requests
>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs')
<Response [200]>

requests[security] allows requests to use the latest version of TLS when negotiating the connection. The built-in openssl on macOS supports TLS v1.2.

Before you install your own version of OpenSSL, ask this question: how is Google Chrome loading https://github.com?

For Mac OS X

1) Update to Python 3.6.5 using the native app installer downloaded from the official Python language website https://www.python.org/downloads/

I’ve found that the installer is taking care of updating the links and symlinks for the new Python a lot better than homebrew.

2) Install a new certificate using “./Install Certificates.command” which is in the refreshed Python 3.6 directory

> cd "/Applications/Python 3.6/"
> sudo "./Install Certificates.command"

As of July 2018, Pypi now requires that clients connecting to it use TLS 1.2. This is an issue if you’re using the version of python shipped with MacOS (2.7.10) because it only supports TLS 1.0. You can change the version of ssl that python is using to fix the problem or upgrade to a newer version of python. Use homebrew to install the new version of python outside of the default library location.

brew install python@2

I got this problem too.
In macos, here is the solution:

• Step 1: brew restall python. now you got python3.7 instead of the old python

• Step 2: build the new env base on python3.7. my path is /usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.2/bin/python3.7

now, you’ll not being disturbed by this problem.

I encountered this exact issue when I attempted gem install bundler, and I was confused by all the Python responses (since I was using Ruby). Here was my exact error:

ERROR:  Could not find a valid gem 'bundler' (>= 0), here is why:
          Unable to download data from https://rubygems.org/ - SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv2/v3 read server hello A: tlsv1 alert protocol version (https://rubygems.org/latest_specs.4.8.gz)

My solution: I updated Ruby to the most recent version (2.6.5). Problem solved.

Another source of this problem: I found that in Debian 9, the Python httplib2 is hardcoded to insist on TLS v1.0. So any application that uses httplib2 to connect to a server that insists on better security fails with TLSV1_ALERT_PROTOCOL_VERSION.

I fixed it by changing

context = ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1)

to

context = ssl.SSLContext()

in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/httplib2/__init__.py .

Debian 10 doesn’t have this problem.

For python2 users on MacOS (python@2 formula won’t be found), as brew stopped support of python2 you need to use such command!
But don’t forget to unlink old python if it was pre-installed.

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/86a44a0a552c673a05f11018459c9f5faae3becc/Formula/[email protected]

If you’ve done some mistake, simply brew uninstall python@2 old way, and try again.

thank you hyperknot (answer here)

I ran into this issue using Flask with the flask_mqtt extension. The solution was to add this to the Python file:

app.config['MQTT_TLS_VERSION'] = ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1_2