Showing posts with label cgi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cgi. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Asp.Net and Python-cgi communication

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I recently had my first shot at writing cgi scripts in python. It was an altogether different experience having come from a .Net and Turbogears background. I also got my hands on a Linux server. Infact, it was the first time I got to use vi, ls, cat, cp etc, since college. It is really amazing how much you can do with just the shell commands on Linux.


The Linux machine had an apache server which ran some cgi scripts to do some basic tasks like creating a new user record in the database, deleting, editing etc. I think that was the reason they did not go beyond cgi. These tasks were manually done by an admin after logging into the application. Now, these scripts were required to be made callable from an asp.net web application.


ASP.NET application <===========> Python cgi scripts
CreateDemo.aspx _____________ create_demo.cgi
(collects user info
for demo record) _____________ (requires authentication)

So, we decided to create another script, let us say 'authenticate.cgi', in which we used urllib python library to by pass the authentication on create_demo.cgi and then CreateDemo.aspx would call authenticate.cgi. Here is the new flow-

CreateDemo.aspx --> authenticate.cgi --> create_demo.cgi

This write-up addresses two key areas:
1. How to communicate with a python cgi script from an asp.net web page?

//Request url and request method

HttpWebRequest httpRequest = HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://192.1.1.1/no_auth/authenticate.cgi?name=harpreet”);

httpRequest.KeepAlive = false;

httpRequest.Method = "GET";

//Read the web response from the URI

string strResponse = string.Empty;

using (WebResponse webResponse = (WebResponse)httpRequest.GetResponse())

{

System.Text.Encoding enc = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);

using (StreamReader srResponseStream = new StreamReader(webResponse.GetResponseStream(), enc))

{

//Read the response into a string or you could use XML also

strResponse = srResponseStream.ReadToEnd();

}

}

2. How to by pass basic authentication on cgi script using urllib?

#!/usr/bin/env /usr/local/bin/python

import urllib2,urllib

import sys,os,cgi,cgitb

import re,datetime

import base64

from urlparse import urlparse

def handler():

form = cgi.FieldStorage()

if form.list:

data = {}

for field in flds:

data[field]=form.getvalue(field,'')

theurl = 'http://localhost/admin/create_demo.cgi’

# you'll need to supply a protected page with your username and password

username = 'scott'

password = 'tiger' # a very bad password

req = urllib2.Request(theurl)

try:

handle = urllib2.urlopen(req, urllib.urlencode(data))

except IOError, e:

# do whatever you want to handle the exception here, 'pass' in this example

pass

else:

# If we don't fail then the page isn't protected

print "This page is not protected by any authentication."

sys.exit(1)

if not hasattr(e, 'code') or e.code != 401:

# we got an error - but not a 401 error

print "This page is not protected by any authentication."

print 'Some other reason for failure'

sys.exit(1)

authheader = e.headers['www-authenticate']

# this gets the www-authenticate line from the headers

# which would contain the authentication scheme and realm

authobj = re.compile(r'''(?:\s*www-authenticate\s*:)?\s*(\w*)\s+realm=['"]([^'"]+)['"]''',re.IGNORECASE)

# this RE is used to extract scheme and realm

matchobj = authobj.match(authheader)

# if the authheader isn't matched by the regular expression

# then there is probably some error in the header

if not matchobj:

print 'The authentication header is badly formed.'

print authheader

sys.exit(1)

scheme = matchobj.group(1)

realm = matchobj.group(2)

# check schem (this example works for basic authorization only

if scheme.lower() != 'basic':

print 'This example only works for BASIC Authorization.'

sys.exit(1)

base64string = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username, password))[:-1]

authheader = "Basic %s" % base64string

req.add_header("Authorization", authheader)

try:

handle = urllib2.urlopen(req,urllib.urlencode(data))

except IOError, e:

print "The username or password is not valid."

sys.exit(1)

thepage = handle.read()

print "Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8"

print

print thepage

handler()

Security was not really a major concern for this cgi, but an IP based security was added to limit unwanted access.

* The code snippets are not really tested but, will hopefully work :-)