Python3: get resource from https server with client certificate authentication

Question

I have a problem getting html page from https server. Access to the resource is secured with client certificate verification (in a browser I must choose proper certificate to access page).

I am trying to use python's http.client library like this:

import http.client
conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection('example.com', 443, key_file = 'tmp/private.pem', cert_file = 'tmp/public.pem')
conn.set_debuglevel(0)
conn.request('GET', '/index.htm')
result = conn.getresponse()
if result.status != http.client.ACCEPTED:
  pass
print(result.status, result.reason)
conn.close()

As an output from this program I get: 403 Forbidden. What am I doing wrong?

Note that I can access this resource directly through browser. The private and public keys are extracted from pkcs12 file exported from that browser with openssl commands (openssl pkcs12 -nocerts -nodes -in cert.p12 -out private.pem and openssl pkcs12 -nokeys -in cert.p12 -out public.pem)

Answer 1

Since I have not get any answer so far I would like to share with you what I have done and how I have resolved this issue.

I tried code sample that is in this StackOverflow question and slightly modify it to Python3:

from urllib.request import Request, urlopen, HTTPSHandler, build_opener
from urllib.error import URLError, HTTPError
import http.client

class HTTPSClientAuthHandler(HTTPSHandler):

  def __init__(self, key, cert):
    HTTPSHandler.__init__(self)
    self.key = key
    self.cert = cert

  def https_open(self, req):
    return self.do_open(self.getConnection, req)

  def getConnection(self, host, timeout=300):
    return http.client.HTTPSConnection(host, key_file=self.key, cert_file=self.cert)

opener = build_opener(HTTPSClientAuthHandler(private_key_file, public_key_file))
response = opener.open("https://example.com/index.htm")
print response.read()

And it just has started to work. I still do not know how to resolve my original issue, but at least I know how to avoid it.

Hope that it will help!