Retrieving SSLSocket Information in Python

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Python Scripts Communicating with HTTPS Servers

∟Retrieving SSLSocket Information in Python

This section provides a tutorial example on retrieving SSL socket information from an HTTPS connection.

If you want to see more information about an HTTPS connection, you can retrieve the ssl.SSLSocket object from the connect object and print out its properties as shown in this Python example script:

#- http-client-SSLSocket-info.py
#- Copyright (c) 2025 HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.

import sys
host = sys.argv[1]
cert = sys.argv[2]

import ssl
context = ssl.create_default_context()
context.load_verify_locations(cafile=cert)

import http.client
conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection(host, context=context)
conn.request("GET", "/")

sock = conn.sock
print(sock.getsockname())
print(sock.getpeername())
print(sock.cipher())

server_cert = sock.getpeercert()
print(server_cert.get('subject'))
print(server_cert.get('issuer'))

res = conn.getresponse()
print(res.read(64))

conn.close()

There are several SSLSocket properties and methods used in this script:

sock = conn.sock - HTTPSConnection property representing the SSLSocket object created by the connection.
sock.getsockname() - SSLSocket method returning the local IP address and port.
sock.getpeername() - SSLSocket method returning the remote IP address and port.
sock.cipher() - SSLSocket method returning the name, protocol and key size of the cipher used for the HTTPS connection.
server_cert = sock.getpeercert() - SSLSocket method returning information about the server certificate.
print(server_cert.get('subject')) - Prints out the subject of the server certificate.
print(server_cert.get('issuer')) - Prints out the issuer of the server certificate.

Here is what I get from the HTTPS connection with www.google.com:

herong$ python3 http-client-SSLSocket-info.py \
  www.google.com /private/etc/ssl/cert.pem

('10.0.0.148', 56628)
('142.251.151.119', 443)
('TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384', 'TLSv1.3', 256)
((('commonName', 'www.google.com'),),)
((('countryName', 'US'),), 
 (('organizationName', 'Google Trust Services'),), 
 (('commonName', 'WR2'),))

b'<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/We'