Crypt::SSLeay - OpenSSL glue that provides LWP https support

  lwp-request https://www.nodeworks.com

  use LWP::UserAgent;
  my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
  my $req = new HTTP::Request('GET', 'https://www.nodeworks.com');
  my $res = $ua->request($req);
  print $res->code."\n";

  # PROXY SUPPORT
  $ENV{HTTPS_PROXY} = 'http://proxy_hostname_or_ip:port';

  # PROXY_BASIC_AUTH
  $ENV{HTTPS_PROXY_USERNAME} = 'username';
  $ENV{HTTPS_PROXY_PASSWORD} = 'password';

  # DEBUGGING SWITCH / LOW LEVEL SSL DIAGNOSTICS
  $ENV{HTTPS_DEBUG} = 1;

  # DEFAULT SSL VERSION
  $ENV{HTTPS_VERSION} = '3';

  # CLIENT CERT SUPPORT
  $ENV{HTTPS_CERT_FILE} = 'certs/notacacert.pem';
  $ENV{HTTPS_KEY_FILE}  = 'certs/notacakeynopass.pem';

  # CA CERT PEER VERIFICATION
  $ENV{HTTPS_CA_FILE}   = 'certs/ca-bundle.crt';
  $ENV{HTTPS_CA_DIR}    = 'certs/';

  # CLIENT PKCS12 CERT SUPPORT
  $ENV{HTTPS_PKCS12_FILE}     = 'certs/pkcs12.pkcs12';
  $ENV{HTTPS_PKCS12_PASSWORD} = 'PKCS12_PASSWORD';

This perl module provides support for the https protocol under LWP, so that a LWP::UserAgent can make https GET & HEAD & POST requests. Please see perldoc LWP for more information on POST requests.

The Crypt::SSLeay package contains Net::SSL, which is automatically loaded by LWP::Protocol::https on https requests, and provides the necessary SSL glue for that module to work via these deprecated modules:

   Crypt::SSLeay::CTX
   Crypt::SSLeay::Conn
   Crypt::SSLeay::X509

Work on Crypt::SSLeay has been continued only to provide https support for the LWP - libwww perl libraries. If you want access to the OpenSSL API via perl, check out Sampo's Net::SSLeay.

You must have OpenSSL or SSLeay installed before compiling this module. You can get the latest OpenSSL package from:

  http://www.openssl.org

When installing openssl make sure your config looks like:

  > ./config --openssldir=/usr/local/openssl
 or
  > ./config --openssldir=/usr/local/ssl

If you are planning on upgrading the default OpenSSL libraries on a system like RedHat, not that I would recommend this, then you might try something like:

  > ./config --openssldir=/usr --shared

The --shared option to config will set up building the .so shared libraries which is important for such systems.

 then
  > make
  > make test
  > make install

This way Crypt::SSLeay will pick up the includes and libraries automatically. If your includes end up going into a separate directory like /usr/local/include, then you may need to symlink /usr/local/openssl/include to /usr/local/include

The latest Crypt::SSLeay can be found at your nearest CPAN, and also:

  http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/by-module/Crypt/

Once you have downloaded it, Crypt::SSLeay installs easily using the make or nmake commands as shown below.

  > perl Makefile.PL
  > make
  > make test
  > make install

  * use nmake for win32

  !!! NOTE for Win32 users, few people seem to be able to build
  W  Crypt::SSLeay successfully on that platform.  You don't need
  I  to because ActiveState has already compiled it for you,
  N  and is available for their perl builds 618 & 522 as a ppm
  3  install.  It may also be available for their latest build.
  2  For problems with this, please contact ActiveState.
  !!!          Please see http://www.activestate.com/

LWP::UserAgent and Crypt::SSLeay have their own versions of proxy support. Please read these sections to see which one may be right for you.

LWP::UserAgent has its own methods of proxying which may work for you and is likely incompatible with Crypt::SSLeay proxy support. To use LWP::UserAgent proxy support, try something like:

  my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
  $ua->proxy([qw( https http )], "$proxy_ip:$proxy_port");

At the time of this writing, libwww v5.6 seems to proxy https requests fine with an Apache mod_proxy server. It sends a line like:

  GET https://www.nodeworks.com HTTP/1.1

to the proxy server, which is not the CONNECT request that some proxies would expect, so this may not work with other proxy servers than mod_proxy. The CONNECT method is used by Crypt::SSLeay's internal proxy support.

For native Crypt::SSLeay proxy support of https requests, you need to set an environment variable HTTPS_PROXY to your proxy server & port, as in:

  # PROXY SUPPORT
  $ENV{HTTPS_PROXY} = 'http://proxy_hostname_or_ip:port';
  $ENV{HTTPS_PROXY} = '127.0.0.1:8080';

Use of the HTTPS_PROXY environment variable in this way is similar to LWP::UserAgent->env_proxy() usage, but calling that method will likely override or break the Crypt::SSLeay support, so do not mix the two.

Basic auth credentials to the proxy server can be provided this way:

  # PROXY_BASIC_AUTH
  $ENV{HTTPS_PROXY_USERNAME} = 'username';
  $ENV{HTTPS_PROXY_PASSWORD} = 'password';

For an example of LWP scripting with Crypt::SSLeay native proxy support, please see the source of the ./lwp-ssl-test script in the Crypt::SSLeay distribution.

Certificate support is new provided by patches from Tobias Manthey. Is ALPHA as of .25, but looking pretty stable as of .29.

PEM encoded certificate and private key files may be used like this:

  $ENV{HTTPS_CERT_FILE} = 'certs/notacacert.pem';
  $ENV{HTTPS_KEY_FILE}  = 'certs/notacakeynopass.pem';

You may test your files with the ./net_ssl_test program by issuing a command like:

  ./net_ssl_test -cert=certs/notacacert.pem -key=certs/notacakeynopass.pem -d GET $HOST_NAME

Additionally, if you would like to tell the client where the CA file is, you may set these. These *CA* configs are ALPHA as of version .29.

  $ENV{HTTPS_CA_FILE} = "some_file";
  $ENV{HTTPS_CA_DIR}  = "some_dir";

There is no sample CA cert file at this time for testing, but you may configure ./net_ssl_test to use your CA cert with the -CAfile option.

To create simple test certificates with openssl, you may:

     /usr/local/openssl/bin/openssl req -config /usr/local/openssl/openssl.cnf -new -days 365 -newkey rsa:1024 -x509 -keyout notacakey.pem -out notacacert.pem

To remove the pass phrase from the key file, execute this: /usr/local/openssl/bin/openssl rsa -in notacakey.pem -out notacakeynopass.pem

New as of version .45 is PKCS12 certificate support thanks to Daisuke Kuroda The directives for enabling use of these certificates is:

  $ENV{HTTPS_PKCS12_FILE}     = 'certs/pkcs12.pkcs12';
  $ENV{HTTPS_PKCS12_PASSWORD} = 'PKCS12_PASSWORD';

Use of this type of certificate will take precedence over previous certificate settings described.

Crypt::SSLeay tries very hard to connect to ANY SSL web server trying to accomodate servers that are buggy, old or simply not standards compliant. To this effect, this module will try SSL connections in this order:

  SSL v23  - should allow v2 & v3 servers to pick their best type
  SSL v3   - best connection type
  SSL v2   - old connection type

Unfortunately, some servers seem not to handle a reconnect to SSL v3 after a failed connect of SSL v23 is tried, so you may set before using LWP or Net::SSL:

  $ENV{HTTPS_VERSION} = 3;

so that a SSL v3 connection is tried first. At this time only a SSL v2 connection will be tried after this, as the connection attempt order remains unchanged by this setting.

This module has been compiled on the following platforms:

 PLATFORM       CPU     SSL             PERL     VER    DATE            WHO
 --------       ---     ---             ----     ---    ----            ---
 Linux 2.4.7    x86     OpenSSL 0.9.7   5.00800  .51    2003-06-10      Joshua Chamas
 Linux 2.4.7    x86     OpenSSL 0.9.6g  5.00800  .49    2003-01-29      Joshua Chamas
 Win2000 SP2    x86     OpenSSL 0.9.7   5.00601  .49    2003-01-29      Joshua Chamas
 WinNT SP6      x86     OpenSSL 0.9.6a  5.00601  .45    2002-08-01      Joshua Chamas
 Linux 2.4.7    x86     OpenSSL 0.9.6d  5.00800  .45    2002-08-01      Joshua Chamas
 Linux 2.4.7    x86     OpenSSL 0.9.6   5.00601  .39    2002-06-23      Joshua Chamas
 Solaris 2.8    Sparc   ?               5.00503  .37    2002-05-31      Christopher Biow
 OpenBSD 2.8    Sparc   ?               5.00600  .25    2001-04-11      Tim Ayers
 Linux 2.2.14   x86     OpenSSL 0.9.6   5.00503  .25    2001-04-10      Joshua Chamas
 WinNT SP6      x86     OpenSSL 0.9.4   5.00404  .25    2001-04-10      Joshua Chamas
 Solaris 2.7    Sparc   OpenSSL 0.9.6   5.00503  .22    2001-03-01      Dave Paris
 AIX 4.3.2      RS/6000 OpenSSL 0.9.6   5.6.0    .19    2001-01-08      Peter Heimann
 Solaris 2.6    x86     OpenSSL 0.9.5a  5.00501  .17    2000-09-04      Joshua Chamas
 Linux 2.2.12   x86     OpenSSL 0.9.5a  5.00503  .16    2000-07-13      David Harris
 FreeBSD 3.2    ?x86    OpenSSL 0.9.2b  5.00503  ?      1999-09-29      Rip Toren
 Solaris 2.6    ?Sparc  OpenSSL 0.9.4   5.00404  ?      1999-08-24      Patrick Killelea
 FreeBSD 2.2.5  x86     OpenSSL 0.9.3   5.00404  ?      1999-08-19      Andy Lee
 Solaris 2.5.1  USparc  OpenSSL 0.9.4   5.00503  ?      1999-08-18      Marek Rouchal
 Solaris 2.6    x86     SSLeay 0.8.0    5.00501  ?      1999-08-12      Joshua Chamas
 Linux 2.2.10   x86     OpenSSL 0.9.4   5.00503  ?      1999-08-11      John Barrett
 WinNT SP4      x86     SSLeay 0.9.2    5.00404  ?      1999-08-10      Joshua Chamas

If you cannot get it to build on your windows box, try ActiveState perl, at least their builds 522 & 618 are known to have a ppm install of Crypt::SSLeay available. Please see http://www.activestate.com for more info.

The __umoddi3 problem applies here as well when compiling with gcc.

Alternative solution: In Makefile.PL, prepend CW-L/usr/local/<path to your gcc lib>/<version> to the CW$LIBS value. Add after line 82:

 $LIBS = '-L' . dirname(`gcc -print-libgcc-file-name`) . ' ' . $LIBS;

 Problem:

On Solaris x86, the default PERL configuration, and preferred, is to use the ld linker that comes with the OS, not gcc. Unfortunately during the OpenSSL build process, gcc generates in libcrypto.a, from bn_word.c, the undefined symbol __umoddi3, which is supposed to be later resolved by gcc from libgcc.a

The system ld linker does not know about libgcc.a by default, so when building Crypt::SSLeay, there is a linker error for __umoddi3

 Solution:

The fix for this symlink your libgcc.a to some standard directory like /usr/local/lib, so that the system linker, ld, can find it when building Crypt::SSLeay.

If you encounter this error: ...des.h:96: #error _ is defined, but some strange definition the DES library cannot handle that..., then you need to edit the des.h file and comment out the #error line.

Its looks like this error might be common to other operating systems, and that occurs with OpenSSL 0.9.3. Upgrades to 0.9.4 seem to fix this problem.

Problems: (initial build was fine, but execution of Perl scripts had problems)

Got a message ld.so: Undefined symbol: _CRYPT_mem_ctrl solution: In the Makefile, comment out the line with -fpic (also try changing to -fPIC, and this works also, not sure if one is preferred).

Many thanks to Gisle Aas for the original writing of this module and many others including libwww for perl. The web will never be the same :)

Ben Laurie deserves kudos for his excellent patches for better error handling, SSL information inspection, and random seeding.

Thanks to Dongqiang Bai for host name resolution fix when using a proxy.

Thanks to Stuart Horner of Core Communications, Inc. who found the need for building --shared OpenSSL libraries.

Thanks to Pavel Hlavnicka for a patch for freeing memory when using a pkcs12 file, and for inspiring more robust read() behavior.

James Woodyatt is a champ for finding a ridiculous memory leak that has been the bane of many a Crypt::SSLeay user.

Thanks to Bryan Hart for his patch adding proxy support, and thanks to Tobias Manthey for submitting another approach.

Thanks to Alex Rhomberg for Alpha linux ccc patch.

Thanks to Tobias Manthey for his patches for client certificate support.

Thanks to Gamid Isayev for CA cert support and insight into error messaging.

Thanks to Jeff Long for working through a tricky CA cert SSLClientVerify issue.

Thanks to Chip Turner for patch to build under perl 5.8.0

For use of Crypt::SSLeay & Net::SSL with perl's LWP, please send email to libwww@perl.org

For OpenSSL or general SSL support please email the openssl user mailing list at openssl-users@openssl.org . This includes issues associated with building and installing OpenSSL on one's system.

Emails to these lists sent with at least Crypt::SSLeay in the subject line will be responded to more quickly by myself. Please make the subject line informative like

  Subject: [Crypt::SSLeay] compile problems on Solaris

This module was originally written by Gisle Aas, and I am currently maintaining it.

Patches, bug reports, and feedback are welcome, and for feature requests, you may get a contract with my company. Please see http://www.chamas.com/consulting.htm for the best in Perl consulting and contract work.

 Copyright (c) 1999-2003 Joshua Chamas.
 Copyright (c) 1998 Gisle Aas.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.