SSLVerifyClient client certificate variables

[karpet@…]

Our systems are all locked down to client certificate, and then usually a user is identified by the email address field on their certificate. I've initially added support for accessing the apache variable (SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_Email) by adding the following function to ModPythonRequest:

def ssl_var_lookup(self, variable_name):
        return self._req.ssl_var_lookup(variable_name)

It'd be nice to have this, or an equivalent, available without patching my django source. It would also be nice to have this usable to secure the admin sections as well instead of using passwords.

[James Bennett]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, the auth system should be able to handle this, because it supports dropping in your own custom authentication schemes, which can be based on anything; there are a couple LDAP auth schemes for Django floating around, for example. See here for documentation on how to do so: ​http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/authentication/#writing-an-authentication-backend

[karpet@…]

OK, the SSL variable -> User lookup can actually be done with a custom Authentication Middleware.
I still can't find any way to access apache/mod_python's SSL Certificate variables without the above mod to django.core.handlers.ModPythonRequest

[Adrian Holovaty]

This is too much of an edge case to add to Django.