Hello,

I'm experiencing a strange problem when using curl to submit some data
to a publicly accessible https secured web page. The web page uses a
session cookie and a base-64 encoded blob to pre-authenticate the user.
Once the blob and the cookie are on the client and the blob has been
posted back to the web page, a login form is presented.

When I access the page using a web browser like lynx or w3m, I have no
problem to get to the login form. However, if I try to use curl to
access the web page, I always get the equivalent to a HTTP-500. There
are a few redirects being used by the page, so the URL changes in the
process, but I figure that curl can handle this. However, the first
server that I have to connect to sends a "Connection: Keep-Alive" header
and I don't know if the process fails because of this. I do not see an
option in curl how to handle this.

The original web page is at http://access.qut.edu.au and my curl script
to access the site is (in bash syntax):

#############################################################

#!/bin/sh
COOKIES="`mktemp auth-cookies-XXXXXXX`"
outfile1=access-1.html
SESSION_CONTROLLER="https://esoe.qut.edu.au/sso"
TARGET_URL="http://access.qut.edu.au"
curl -j -L -k -i -c ${COOKIES} --compressed "${TARGET_URL}" > $outfile1
SESSION_ID=`grep -a SAMLRequest ${outfile1} | grep value | awk
-F"value=" '{print $2}' | sed s,"/>$",,g | sed s,"^\"",,g | sed s,"\"$",,g`
# leading/trailing "
REFERER="`grep -a Location: ${outfile1} | awk '{print $NF}'`"
echo "------------------ SESSION ID ---------------------"
echo ${SESSION_ID}
echo "------------------ SESSION ID ---------------------"
echo "------------------ REFERER ---------------------"
echo ${REFERER}
echo "------------------ REFERER ---------------------"
echo "------------------ COOKIES ---------------------"
cat $COOKIES
echo "------------------ COOKIES ---------------------"
curl --trace - -k -i -b ${COOKIES} -c ${COOKIES} \
  -L \
  -e "${REFERER}" \
  -A "Mozilla/4.0" \
  --data "SAMLRequest=${SESSION_ID}" \
  --data "submit=Verify Identity" \
  -m 90 \
  --digest \
  -D header.html \
  ${SESSION_CONTROLLER}

#############################################################

Does anybody have any idea why the connection does not work with curl
while it works with any browser I tried?

Thanks & Regards,

Georg
Received on 2008-05-26