Self-Signed Certificate Authorities pip / conda

After extensively documenting a similar problem with Git (How can I make git accept a self signed certificate?), here we are again behind a corporate firewall with a proxy giving us a MitM "attack" that we should trust and:

NEVER disable all SSL verification!

This creates a bad security culture. Don't be that person.

tl;dr

pip config set global.cert path/to/ca-bundle.crtpip config listconda config --set ssl_verify path/to/ca-bundle.crtconda config --show ssl_verify# Bonus while we are here...git config --global http.sslVerify truegit config --global http.sslCAInfo path/to/ca-bundle.crt

But where do we get ca-bundle.crt?

Get an up to date CA Bundle

cURL publishes an extract of the Certificate Authorities bundled with Mozilla Firefox

https://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html

• Direct Download
• SHA256

I recommend you open up this cacert.pem file in a text editor as we will need to add our self-signed CA to this file.

Certificates are a document complying with X.509 but they can be encoded to disk a few ways. The below article is a good read but the short version is that we are dealing with the base64 encoding which is often called PEM in the file extensions. You will see it has the format:

----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----....base64 encoded binary data....----END CERTIFICATE----

https://support.ssl.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/19/0/der-vs-crt-vs-cer-vs-pem-certificates-and-how-to-convert-them

Getting our Self Signed Certificate

Below are a few options on how to get our self signed certificate:

• Via OpenSSL CLI
• Via Browser
• Via Python Scripting

Get our Self-Signed Certificate by OpenSSL CLI

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/451207/how-to-trust-self-signed-certificate-in-curl-command-line/468360#468360

echo quit | openssl s_client -showcerts -servername "curl.haxx.se" -connect curl.haxx.se:443 > cacert.pem

Get our Self-Signed Certificate Authority via Browser

• Acquiring your CA: https://stackoverflow.com/a/50486128/622276
  • http://blog.majcica.com/2016/12/27/installing-self-signed-certificates-into-git-cert-store/

Thanks to this answer and the linked blog, it shows steps (on Windows) how to view the certificate and then copy to file using the base64 PEM encoding option.

Copy the contents of this exported file and paste it at the end of your cacerts.pem file.

For consistency rename this file cacerts.pem --> ca-bundle.crt and place it somewhere easy like:

# Windows%USERPROFILE%\certs\ca-bundle.crt# Linux/macOS$HOME/certs/cabundle.crt

Get our Self-Signed Certificate Authority via Python

Thanks to all the brilliant answers in:

How to get response SSL certificate from requests in python?

I have put together the following to attempt to take it a step further.

https://github.com/neozenith/get-ca-py

Finally

Set the configuration in pip and conda so that it knows where this CA store resides with our extra self-signed CA.

# Windowspip config set global.cert %USERPROFILE%\certs\ca-bundle.crtconda config --set ssl_verify %USERPROFILE%\certs\ca-bundle.crt

OR

# Linux / macOSpip config set global.cert $HOME/certs/ca-bundle.crtconda config --set ssl_verify $HOME/certs/ca-bundle.crt

THEN

pip config listconda config --show ssl_verify# Hot tip: use -v to show where your pip config file is...pip config list -v# Example output for macOS and homebrew installed pythonFor variant 'global', will try loading '/Library/Application Support/pip/pip.conf'For variant 'user', will try loading '/Users/jpeak/.pip/pip.conf'For variant 'user', will try loading '/Users/jpeak/.config/pip/pip.conf'For variant 'site', will try loading '/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.4/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/pip.conf'

Troubleshooting

Based on a great comment below

I've tried this and still get a SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1123)')) error. Any suggestions?

here is a troubleshooting guide:

This is the normal error message when the certificates authorities are not yet correctly setup.

It could be a variety of factors to check:

• The paths to your ca-bundle.crt have the right path separators for your OS (it has stung me),
• you may not have the latest CAs to verify normal certificates,
• you may not have added your CA in the right encoding.

Python is effectively doing those 3 steps:

• Find my CA store,
• read all entries,
• look up this certificate against my trust store.

If any of those fail you get this error message from experience.

Check this answer linked from below to display and check your ssl_cert_dir using:

python -c "import ssl; print(ssl.get_default_verify_paths())"

References

• Pip SSL: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/user_guide/#configuration
• Conda SSL: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35804869/622276
• Acquiring your CA: https://stackoverflow.com/a/50486128/622276
  • http://blog.majcica.com/2016/12/27/installing-self-signed-certificates-into-git-cert-store/
• Using Python to automatically grab your Peer CA: How to get response SSL certificate from requests in python?

Run: python -c "import ssl; print(ssl.get_default_verify_paths())" to check the current paths which are used to verify the certificate. Add your company's root certificate to one of those.

The path openssl_capath_env points to the environment variable: SSL_CERT_DIR.

If SSL_CERT_DIR doesn't exist, you will need to create it and point it to a valid folder within your filesystem. You can then add your certificate to this folder to use it.

Alternative solution on Windows is to install python-certifi-win32 that will allow Python to use Windows Certificate Store.

pip install python-certifi-win32