PyCurlSSLBug

Introduction

If you experience errors when using Wfuzz against SSL sites, it could be because an old know issue:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=515200

Briefly, pycurl is built against libcurl3-gnutls, which does not work with a number of web sites. Pycurl fails with the following error message:

   pycurl.error: (35, 'gnutls_handshake() failed: A TLS packet with unexpected
   length was received.')

Verifying the problem

• Pycurl linked against gnutls:

$ python
>>> import pycurl
>>> pycurl.version
libcurl/7.21.3 GnuTLS/2.8.6 zlib/1.2.3.4 libidn/1.18'

• Pycurl linked against openssl:

$ python
>>> import pycurl
>>> pycurl.version
'libcurl/7.21.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8o zlib/1.2.3.4 libidn/1.18'

Workaround

• We should built pycurl against openssl:

In newer Ubuntu versions, you can install libcurl in openssl or gnutls flavour:

# apt-cache search libcurl
libcurl4-gnutls-dev - development files and documentation for libcurl (GnuTLS flavour)
libcurl4-nss-dev - development files and documentation for libcurl (NSS flavour)
libcurl4-openssl-dev - development files and documentation for libcurl (OpenSSL flavour)

• Alternatively, it can be done manually:

1. sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dpkg-dev
2. mkdir ~/python-pycurl-openssl
3. cd ~/python-pycurl-openssl
4. sudo apt-get source python-pycurl
5. sudo apt-get build-dep python-pycurl
6. sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
7. sudo dpkg-source -x pycurl_7.19.0-3build1.dsc
8. cd pycurl-7.19.0
9. edit debian/control file and replace all instances of “libcurl4-gnutls-dev” with “libcurl4-openssl-dev”
10. sudo dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
11. sudo dpkg -i ../python-pycurl_7.19.0-3build1_i386.deb

Updates from other users:

Comment by andreas.fitzek, Sep 13, 2014 Hi,

Got it working on Ubuntu 14.04 amd64 with step 10 being: sudo PYCURL_SSL_LIBRARY=openssl dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b

Their are still some errors: ImportError?: No module named bottle

But the library is working now with openssl:

>>> import pycurl
>>> pycurl.version 'PycURL/7.19.3 libcurl/7.35.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1f zlib/1.2.8 libidn/1.28 librtmp/2.3'

Comment by DoommedRaven, Sep 14, 2014 for your import error check this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9122200/importerror-no-module-named-bottle