pyx509: X.509 Certificate and PKCS7 Parser / Verifier for Python

This is a fork of the original project:

pyx509 - Python library for parsing X.509 Copyright (C) 2009-2012 CZ.NIC, z.s.p.o. (http://www.nic.cz)

Work in progress!

Description

This is probably the most complete parser of X.509 certificates in python.

Code is in alpha stage! Don't use for anything sensitive. I wrote it (based on previous work of colleagues) since there is no comprehensive python parser for X.509 certificates. Often python programmers had to parse openssl output.

Advantages

• I find it less painful to use than parsing output of 'openssl x509' somewhat stricter in extension parsing compared to openssl

Disadvantages

• It's slow compared to openssl (about 2.3x compared to RHEL's openssl-1.0-fips)
• Currently not very strict in what string types in RDNs it accepts
• API is still rather ugly and has no documentation yet; code is nasty at some places (and there's some old dangling code like pkcs7/verifier.py)

Dependencies

• pyasn1 >= 0.1.7

Installation

Install with pip:

pip install pyx509_ph4

License

LGPL v2 or later.

See LICENSE.txt.

Known bugs and quirks

• Subject alternative name doesn't show all subtypes, but 'DNS', 'dirName' and 'email' are supported.
• Name constraints don't distinguish among various GeneralName subtypes
• Some extensions are not shown very nicely when put in string format
• Not all extensions are supported
• String types accepted for various RDN subelements are rather too permissive
• RDN string conversion does not conform to RFC 4514
• Badly formed extensions are ignored if not marked critical
  • easy to switch to more strict behavior
  • other clients do this as well; RFC 5280 specifies behavior for unknown elements in extensions in appendix B.1, but does not cover all cases (e.g. element exists, but with string type different from spec)

TODO

• Cleanup: This module has it's own pyasn1 models. Look if we can reuse the pyasn1_modules.rfc2459 X509 cert model. https://github.com/etingof/pyasn1-modules/blob/master/tools/pkcs7dump.py
• Cleanup: Currently, the signature verifier does not work.