Change log

This summarizes the changes between released versions. For a complete change log, see the git history. For details on the changes, see the respective git commits indicated at the start of the entry.

Version 0.4.3

Compatibility

  • Fix compatibility with websockets 10.1.

Minor enhancements

  • Failure path fixes.

Version 0.4.2

New features

  • Experimental support for DTLS server operation (PSK only).

Tools

  • aiocoap-client reports responder address if different from requested.
  • aiocoap-rd is aligned with draft version -27 (e.g. using .well-known/rd).
  • aiocoap-proxy can be registered to an RD.

Compatibility

  • Group OSCORE updated to -11.
  • Fixes to support Python 3.10, including removal of some deprecated idioms and inconsistent loop handling.

Examples / contrib

  • Demo for Deterministic OSCORE added.

Deprecations

  • util.quote_nonascii
  • error.{RequestTimedOut,WaitingForClientTimedOut}
  • Direct use of AsyncCLIDaemon from asynchronous contexts (replacement not available yet).

Minor enhancements

  • Resources can hide themselves from the listing in /.well-known/core.
  • RD’s built-in proxy handles block-wise better.
  • Added __repr__ to TokenManager and MessageManager.
  • Pretty printer errs gracefully.
  • Failure path fixes.
  • Documentation updates.
  • Removed distutils dependency.

Internal refactoring

  • CI testing now uses pytest.
  • dispatch_error now passes on exceptions.
  • DTLS client cleaned up.
  • Build process now uses the build module.

Version 0.4.1

  • Fix Python version reference to clearly indicate the 3.7 requirement everywhere.

    A Python requirement of “>= 3.6.9” was left over in the previous release’s metadata from earlier intermediate steps that accomodated PyPy’s pre-3.7 version.

Version 0.4

Multicast improvements

  • Multicast groups are not joined by default any more. Instead, groups and interfaces on which to join need to be specified explicitly. The previous mechanism was unreliable, and only joined on one (more or less random) interface.
  • Network interfaces can now be specified in remotes of larger than link-local scope.
  • In udp6, network interface are selected via PKTINFO now. They used to be selected using the socket address tuple, but that was limited to link-local addresses, but PKTINFO worked just as well for link-local addresses.
  • Remote addresses in udp6 now have a netif property.

New features

  • The simple6 transport can now indicate the local address when supported by the platoforrm. This makes it a viable candidate for LwM2M clients as they often operate using role reversal.

  • Servers (including the shipped examples) can now offer OSCORE through the OSCORE sitewrapper.

    Access control is only rudimentary in that the authorization information is not available in a convenient form yet.

  • CoAP over WebSockets is now supported (in client and server role, with and without TLS). Please note that the default port bound to is not the HTTP default port but 8683.

  • OSCORE group communication is now minimally supported (based on draft version 10). No automated ways of setting up a context are provided yet.

    This includes highly experimental support for deterministic requests.

  • DTLS: Terminating connections are now handled correctly, and shut down when unused.

    The associated refactoring also reduces the resource usage of DTLS connections.

Tools updates

  • aiocoap-client: New options to
    • set initial Block1 size (–payload-initial-szx), and to
    • elide the Uri-Host option from requests to named hosts.
  • aiocoap-client: CBOR input now accepts Python literals or JSON automatically, and can thus produce numeric keys and byte strings.
  • aiocoap-client: Preprocessed CBOR output now works for any CBOR-based content format.
  • resource-directory: Updated to draft -25.
  • resource-directory: Compatibility mode for LwM2M added.
  • resource-directory: Proxying extension implemented. With this, and RD can be configured to allow access to endpoints behind a firewalls or NAT.
  • Example server: Add /whoami resource.

Dependencies

  • The minimum required Python version is now 3.7.
  • The cbor library dependency was replaced with the cbor2 library.
  • The dependency on the hkdf library was removed.
  • The ge25519 library dependency was added to perform key conversion steps necessary for Group OSCORE.

Portability

  • Several small adjustments were made to accomodate execution on Windows.
  • FreeBSD was added to the list of supported systems (without any need for changes).

Fixes possibly breaking applications

  • Some cases of OSError were previously raised in responses. Those are now all expressed as an aiocoap.error.NetworkError, so that an application only need to catch aiocoap.error.Error for anything that’s expected to go wrong.

    The original error cause is available in a chained exception.

  • Responses are not deduplicated any more; as a result, less state is kept in the library.

    As a result, separate responses whose ACKs get lost produce an RST the second time the CON comes. This changes nothing about the client-side handling (which is complete either way with the first response), but may upset servers that do not anticipate this allowed behavior.

Minor fixes

  • The repr of udp6 addresses now shows all address components.
  • Debug information output was increased in several spots.
  • The loop= parameter was removed where it is deprecated by Python 3.8.
  • asyncio Futures are created using create_future in some places.
  • Binding to port 0 works again.
  • The file server’s registration at an RD was fixed.
  • File server directories can now use block-wise transfer.
  • Server errors from rendering exceptions to messages are now caught.
  • Notifications now respect the block size limit.
  • Several improvements to the test infrastructure.
  • Refactoring around request processing internals (PlumbingRequest) alleviated potential memory leaks.
  • Update option numbers from draft-ietf-echo-request-tag-10.
  • Various proxying fixes and enhancements.
  • TLS: Use SNI (Python >= 3.8), set correct hostinfo based on it.
  • Internally used NoResponse options on responses are not leaked any more.
  • Timeouts from one remote are now correctly propagated to all pending requests.
  • Various logging improvements and changes.
  • udp6: Show warnings when operating system fails to deliver pktinfo (happens with very old Linux kernels).
  • Reduce installation clobber by excluding tests.
  • Enhanced error reporting for erroneous coap://2001:db8::1/ style URIs
  • Improve OSCORE’s shutdown robustness.
  • Sending to IPv4 literals now does not send the Uri-Host automatically any more.

Version 0.4b3

Behavioral changes

  • Responses to NON requests are now sent as NON.

Portability

  • All uses of SO_REUSEPORT were changed to SO_REUSEADDR, as REUSEPORT is considered dangerous by some and removed from newer Python versions.

    On platoforms without support for that option, it is not set. Automatic load-balancing by running parallel servers is not supported there.

  • The udp6 module is now usable on platforms without MSG_ERRQUEUE (ie. anything but Linux). This comes with caveats, so it is still only enabled by default on Linux.

    The required constants are now shipped with aiocoap for macOS for the benefit of Python versions less than 3.9.

Minor fixes

  • More effort is made to sync OSCORE persistence files to disk.
  • Memory leakage fixes on server and client side.
  • Option numbers for Echo and Request-Tag were updated according to the latest draft version.

Other

  • FAQ section started in the documentation.
  • With ./setup.py test being phased out, tests are now run via tox.

Version 0.4b2

New features

  • OSCORE: Implement Appendix B.1 recovery. This allows the aiocoap program to run OSCORE without writing sequence numbers and replay windows to disk all the time. Instead, they write pessimistic values to disk that are rarely updated, write the last values on shutdown. In the event of an unclean shutdown, the sender sequence number is advanced by some, and the first request from a client is sent back for another roundtrip using the Echo option.

    An aiocoap client now also contains the code required to transparently resubmit requests if a server is in such a recovery situation.

  • OSCORE: Security contexts are now protected against simultaneous use by multiple aiocoap processes. This incurs an additional dependency on the filelock package.

Breaking changes

  • OSCORE: The file format of security context descriptions is changed. Instead of the previous roles concept, they now carry explicit sender and recipient IDs, and consequently do not take a role parameter in the credentials file any more.

    The sequence number format has changed incompatibly.

    No automatic conversion is available. It is recommended to replace old security contexts with new keys.

Minor fixes

  • b4540f9: Fix workaround for missing definitions, restoring Python 3.5 support on non-amd64 platforms.
  • b4b886d: Fix regression in the display of zone identifiers in IPv6 addresses.
  • 5055bd5: The server now does not send RSTs in response to multicasts any more.
  • OSCORE: The replay window used is now the prescribed 32bit large DTLS-like window.

Version 0.4b1

Tools

  • aiocoap-client can now re-format binary output (hex-dumping binary files, showing CBOR files in JSON-like notation) and apply syntax highlighting. By default, this is enabled if the output is a terminal. If output redirection is used, data is passed on as-is.
  • aiocoap-fileserver is now provided as a standalone tool. It provides directory listings in link format, guesses the content format of provided files, and allows observation.
  • aiocoap-rd is now provided as a standalone tool and offers a simple CoRE Resource Directory server.

Breaking changes

  • Client observations that have been requested by sending the Observe option must now be taken up by the client. The warning that was previously shown when an observation was shut down due to garbage collection can not be produced easily in this version, and will result in a useless persisting observation in the background. (See <https://github.com/chrysn/aiocoap/issues/104>)

  • Server resources that expect the library to do handle blockwise by returning true to needs_blockwise_assembly do not allow random initial access any more; this this is especially problematic with clients that use a different source port for every package.

    The old behavior was prone to triggering an action twice on non-safe methods, and generating wrong results in block1+block2 scenarios when a later FETCH block2:2/x/x request would be treated as a new operation and return the result of an empty request body rather than being aligned with an earlier FETCH block1:x/x/x operation.

  • fdc8b024: Support for Python 3.4 is dropped; minimum supported version is now 3.5.2.

  • 0124ad0e: The network dumping feature was removed, as it would have been overly onerous to support it with the new more flexible transports.

  • 092cf49f, 89c2a2e0: The content type mapped to the content format 0 was changed from “text/plain” (which was incorrect as it was just the bare media type) to the actual content of the IANA registry, ‘text/plain;charset=”utf8”’. For looking up the content format, text/plain is is still supported but deprecated.

  • 17d1de5a: Handling of the various components of a remote was unified into the .remote property of messages. If you were previously setting unresolved addresses or even a tuple-based remote manualy, please set them using the uri pseudo-option now.

  • 47863a29: Re-raise transport specific errors as aiocoap errors as aiocoap.error.ResolutionError or NetworkError. This allows API users to catch them independently of the underlying transport.

  • f9824eb2: Plain strings as paths in add_resource are rejected. Applications that did this are very unlikely to have produced the intended behavior, and if so can be easily fixed by passing in tuple(s) rather than s.

New features

  • 88f44a5d: TCP and TLS support added; TLS is currently limited to PKI certificates. This includes support for preserving the URI scheme in exchanges (0b0214db).
  • a50da1a8: The credentials module was added to dispatch DTLS and OSCORE credentials
  • f302da07: On the client side, OSCORE can now be used as a transport without any manual protection steps. It is automatically used for URIs for which a security context has been registered with the context’s client credentials.
  • 5e5388ae: Support for PyPy
  • 0d09b2eb: NoResponse is now handled automatically. Handlers can override the default handling by setting a No-Response option on their response messages, whose value will them be examined by the library to decide whether the message is actually sent; the No-Response option is stripped from the outgoing message in the course of that (as it’s actually not a response option).
  • b048a50a: Some improvements on multicast handling. There is still no good support for sending a request to multicast and receiving the individual responses, but requests to multicast addresses are now unconditionally handled under the rules of multicast CoAP, even if they’re used over the regular request interface (ie. sending to multicast but processing only the first response).
  • c7ca0286: The software version used to run the server (by default, aiocoap’s version) is now shown in .well-known/core using the impl-info relation.

Deprecations

  • 0d09b2eb: Returning a NoResponse sentinel value is now deprecated.

Assorted changes

  • Additions to the contrib/ collection of aiocoap based tools:
    • widgets, kivy-widgets
    • rd-relay
  • 95c681a5 and others: Internal interfaces were introduced for the various CoAP sublayers. This should largely not affect operation (though it does change the choice of tokens or message IDs); where it does, it’s noted above in the breaking changes.
  • 5e5388ae, 9e17180e, 60137bd8: Various fixes to the OSCORE implementation, which is not considered experimental any more.
  • Various additions to the test suite
  • 61843d41: Asynchronous recvmsg calling (as used by the udp6 backend) was reworked from monkey-patching into using asyncio’s add_reader method, and should thus now be usable on all asyncio implementations, including uvloop and gbulb.
  • 3ab14c49: .well-known/core filtering will now properly filter by content format (ct=) in the presence of multiple supported content types.
  • 9bd612de: Fix encoding of block size 16.
  • 029a8f0e: Don’t enforce V4MAPPED addresses in the simple6 backend. This makes the backend effectively a simple-any backend, as the address family can be picked arbitrarily by the operating system.
  • 8e93eeb9: The simple6 backend now reuses the most recently used 64 sockets.
  • cb8743b6: Resolve the name given as binding server name. This enables creating servers bound exclusively to a link-local address.
  • d6aa5f8c: TinyDTLS now pulls in a more recent version of DTLSSocket that has its version negotiation fixed, and can thus interoperate with recent versions of libcoap and RIOT’s the pending support for DTLS on Gcoap.
  • 3d9613ab: Errors in URI encoding were fixed

Version 0.4a1

Security fixes

  • 18ddf8c: Proxy now only creates log files when explicitly requested
  • Support for secured protocols added (see Experimental Features)

Experimental features

  • Support for OSCORE (formerly OSCOAP) and CoAP over DTLS was included

    These features both lack proper key management so far, which will be available in a 0.4 release.

  • Added implementations of Resource Directory (RD) server and endpoint

  • Support for different transports was added. The transport backends to enable are chosen heuristically depending on operating system and installed modules.

    • Transports for platforms not supporting all POSIX operations to run CoAP correctly were added (simple6, simplesocketserver). This should allow running aiocoap on Windows, MacOS and using uvloop, but with some disadvantages (see the the respective transport documentations).

Breaking changes

  • 8641b5c: Blockwise handling is now available as stand-alone responder. Applications that previously created a Request object rather than using Protocol.request now need to create a BlockwiseRequest object.
  • 8641b5c: The .observation property can now always be present in responses, and applications that previously checked for its presence should now check whether it is None.
  • cdfeaeb: The multicast interface using queuewithend was replaced with asynchronous iterators
  • d168f44: Handling of sub-sites changed, subsites’ root resources now need to reside at path ("",)

Deprecations

  • e50e994: Rename UnsupportedMediaType to UnsupportedContentFormat
  • 9add964 and others: The .remote message property is not necessarily a tuple any more, and has its own interface
  • 25cbf54, c67c2c2: Drop support for Python versions < 3.4.4; the required version will be incremented to 3.5 soon.

Assorted changes

  • 750d88d: Errors from predefined exceptions like BadRequest(”…”) are now sent with their text message in the diagnostic payload
  • 3c7635f: Examples modernized
  • 97fc5f7: Multicast handling changed (but is still not fully supported)
  • 933f2b1: Added support for the No-Response option (RFC7967)
  • baa84ee: V4MAPPED addresses are now properly displayed as IPv4 addresses

Tests

  • Test suite is now run at Gitlab, and coverage reported
  • b2396bf: Test suite probes for usable hostnames for localhost
  • b4c5b1d: Allow running tests with a limited set of extras installed
  • General improvements on coverage

Version 0.3

Features

  • 4d07615: ICMP errors are handled
  • 1b61a29: Accept ‘fe80::…%eth0’ style addresses
  • 3c0120a: Observations provide modern async for interface
  • 4e4ff7c: New demo: file server
  • ef2e45e, 991098b, 684ccdd: Messages can be constructed with options, modified copies can be created with the .copy method, and default codes are provided
  • 08845f2: Request objects have .response_nonraising and .response_raising interfaces for easier error handling
  • ab5b88a, c49b5c8: Sites can be nested by adding them to an existing site, catch-all resources can be created by subclassing PathCapable

Possibly breaking changes

  • ab5b88a: Site nesting means that server resources do not get their original Uri-Path any more
  • bc76a7c: Location-{Path,Query} were opaque (bytes) objects instead of strings; disctinction between accidental and intentional opaque options is now clarified

Small features

  • 2bb645e: set_request_uri allows URI parsing without sending Uri-Host
  • e6b4839: Take block1.size_exponent as a sizing hint when sending block1 data
  • 9eafd41: Allow passing in a loop into context creation
  • 9ae5bdf: ObservableResource: Add update_observation_count
  • c9f21a6: Stop client-side observations when unused
  • dd46682: Drop dependency on obscure built-in IN module
  • a18c067: Add numbers from draft-ietf-core-etch-04
  • fabcfd5: .well-known/core supports filtering

Internals

  • f968d3a: All low-level networking is now done in aiocoap.transports; it’s not really hotpluggable yet and only UDPv6 (with implicit v4 support) is implemented, but an extension point for alternative transports.
  • bde8c42: recvmsg is used instead of recvfrom, requiring some asyncio hacks

Package management

  • 01f7232, 0a9d03c: aiocoap-client and -proxy are entry points
  • 0e4389c: Establish an extra requirement for LinkHeader