Logging into SAML/Shibboleth authenticated server using python

I'm trying to login my university's server via python, but I'm entirely unsure of how to go about generating the appropriate HTTP POSTs, creating the keys and certificates, and other parts of the process I may be unfamiliar with that are required to comply with the SAML spec. I can login with my browser just fine, but I'd like to be able to login and access other contents within the server using python.

For reference, here is the site

I've tried logging in by using mechanize (selecting the form, populating the fields, clicking the submit button control via mechanize.Broswer.submit(), etc.) to no avail; the login site gets spat back each time.

At this point, I'm open to implementing a solution in whichever language is most suitable to the task. Basically, I want to programatically login to SAML authenticated server.

Basically what you have to understand is the workflow behind a SAML authentication process. Unfortunately, there is no PDF out there which seems to really provide a good help in finding out what kind of things the browser does when accessing to a SAML protected website.

Maybe you should take a look to something like this: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/33849977/Workflow-to-Use-Shibboleth-Authentication-to-Sign and obviously to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Assertion_Markup_Language. In particular, focus your attention to this scheme:

What I did when I was trying to understand SAML way of working, since documentation was so poor, was writing down (yes! writing - on the paper) all the steps the browser was doing from the first to the last. I used Opera, setting it in order to not allow automatic redirects (300, 301, 302 response code, and so on), and also not enabling Javascript. Then I wrote down all the cookies the server was sending me, what was doing what, and for what reason.

Maybe it was way too much effort, but in this way I was able to write a library, in Java, which is suited for the job, and incredibily fast and efficient too. Maybe someday I will release it public...

What you should understand is that, in a SAML login, there are two actors playing: the IDP (identity provider), and the SP (service provider).

A. FIRST STEP: the user agent request the resource to the SP

I'm quite sure that you reached the link you reference in your question from another page clicking to something like "Access to the protected website". If you make some more attention, you'll notice that the link you followed is not the one in which the authentication form is displayed. That's because the clicking of the link from the IDP to the SP is a step for the SAML. The first step, actally. It allows the IDP to define who are you, and why you are trying to access its resource. So, basically what you'll need to do is making a request to the link you followed in order to reach the web form, and getting the cookies it'll set. What you won't see is a SAMLRequest string, encoded into the 302 redirect you will find behind the link, sent to the IDP making the connection.

I think that it's the reason why you can't mechanize the whole process. You simply connected to the form, with no identity identification done!

B. SECOND STEP: filling the form, and submitting it

This one is easy. Please be careful! The cookies that are now set are not the same of the cookies above. You're now connecting to a utterly different website. That's the reason why SAML is used: different website, same credentials. So you may want to store these authentication cookies, provided by a successful login, to a different variable. The IDP now is going to send back you a response (after the SAMLRequest): the SAMLResponse. You have to detect it getting the source code of the webpage to which the login ends. In fact, this page is a big form containing the response, with some code in JS which automatically subits it, when the page loads. You have to get the source code of the page, parse it getting rid of all the HTML unuseful stuff, and getting the SAMLResponse (encrypted).

C. THIRD STEP: sending back the response to the SP

Now you're ready to end the procedure. You have to send (via POST, since you're emulating a form) the SAMLResponse got in the previous step, to the SP. In this way, it will provide the cookies needed to access to the protected stuff you want to access.

Aaaaand, you're done!

Again, I think that the most precious thing you'll have to do is using Opera and analyzing ALL the redirects SAML does. Then, replicate them in your code. It's not that difficult, just keep in mind that the IDP is utterly different than the SP.