Disabling certificate validation for HTTP request leave application vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

When request methods are used, certificates are validated automatically which is the desired behavior. If certificate validation is explicitly turned off, requests will accept any TLS certificate presented by the server and will ignore hostname mismatches and/or expired certificates, which will make your application vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Using TLS can greatly increase security by guaranteeing the identity of the party you are communicating with. This is accomplished by one or both parties presenting trusted certificates during the connection initialization phase of TLS.

Bad practice

import requests

requests.get('https://gmail.com', verify=False) # Insecure. No certificate validation

Recommended

import requests

requests.get('https://gmail.com', verify=True) # Secure. Certificate validation enabled.
requests.get('https://deepsource.io') # Secure. Certificate validation enabled by default

References:

SSL Cert verification in requests
Man in the middle attack
OWASP Top 10 2021 Category A07 - Identification and Authentication Failures
CWE 300 - Channel Accessible by Non-Endpoint

deepsourcestatus / test-repository

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