How to check the connection to remote server with a digital certificate (client authentication)

Question

I got a digital certificate with extensions for server and client authentication and a private key.

Now I want to connect to a remote server (REST web services) which should accept my requests because of my certificate. As a first step I want to check if this connection will work. The remote server is not under my control.

I have this REST URL https://host.test.com/REST/admin/user/1212/ and I need to do the request with the certificate. So how can I do this through command line (Linux system)?

Solution

You can use curl or wget.

curl --cert <your cert>

or

wget --certificate=<yourt cert>

THe certificate (of course with priv key) needs to be located in a p12 file. You can specify the passphrase of this file.

Comments

[Tim]

I used it this way openssl s_client -connect host.test.com:443 -cert myCert.pem -key myKey.pem, but this only test the connection to the server, not the REST service. With this command, I get a timeout. I have only one certificate, no Root-CA or Intermediate.

[Tim]

I works with wget --certificate ./myCert.pem --private-key ./myKey.pem "https://host.test.com/REST/admin/user/1212/". Thank you

[Mark Meyer]

Can you post the initial output of the command? Timeout sounds a lot like there's a network filter in place. Obviously you can speak HTTP over the secured connection right in the console. If the SSL connect works you can do GET /REST/admin/user/1212/ HTTP/1.1\nHost: host.test.com\n where the \n denotes a newline (simply hit return).