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in reply to How can I access the Web Site Certificate with perl

What are you using to do the HTTPS transfer?

I'm using LWP (libwww-perl) with Crypt::SSLeasy (lib-crypt-ssleay-perl on Debian), and if I say:

 HEAD -x https://db.debian.org/
I get some headers back in the response, e.g.:
Client-SSL-Cert-Issuer: /C=US/ST=Georgia/L=Atlanta/O=Debian/OU=LDAP/CN=db.debian.org/Email=debian-admin@lists.debian.org
Client-SSL-Cert-Subject: /C=US/ST=Georgia/L=Atlanta/O=Debian/OU=LDAP/CN=db.debian.org/Email=debian-admin@lists.debian.org
Client-SSL-Cipher: EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA
Client-SSL-Warning: Peer certificate not verified
I strongly recommend reading the Crypt::SSLeay documentation.

So, to use this in a more substantive example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w require 5.6.0; use strict; use LWP; our $hostname = shift or die "Syntax: $0 hostname\n"; our $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; our $req = HTTP::Request->new(HEAD => "https://$hostname"); our $resp = $ua->request($req); print " Site: ", $resp->header('Client-SSL-Cert-Subject'), " +\n"; print "Cert. Authority: ", $resp->header('Client-SSL-Cert-Issuer'), "\ +n"; print " Cipher: ", $resp->header('Client-SSL-Cipher'), "\n";
and then you should be able to run this script with the hostname of an SSL site as a parmaeter, e.g. "www.verisign.com". HTH