Installing Zscaler Certificate to Anaconda3 - ssl

Question

After the obligatory installation of Zscaler through out the Company my Anaconda started giving me the SSL verification Error while installing modules and using requests to get the urls
Error(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1076)'))': /simple/'some_module'/
SSLError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='www.amazon.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: / (Caused by SSLError(SSLError("bad handshake: Error([('SSL routines', 'tls_process_server_certificate', 'certificate verify failed')])")))
With Zscaler being turned off it all works great, but the company policy does not allow that.....
I found some bypasses like setting verify to False but it is not what I want.
I would like to install the Zscaler certificate (which was provided to me by our IT department) to Anaconda
Now the problem seems to be that it uses conda’s generic certificates.
import ssl
print(ssl.get_default_verify_paths())
Output :
DefaultVerifyPaths(cafile=None, capath=None, openssl_cafile_env='SSL_CERT_FILE', openssl_cafile='C:\ci\openssl_1581353098519\_h_env\Library/cert.pem', openssl_capath_env='SSL_CERT_DIR', openssl_capath='C:\ci\openssl_1581353098519\_h_env\Library/certs')
Any idea what could I possibly do to point conda to the Zscaler certificate that I have??
system inf: Windows 10, Anaconda3 -2020.02, Python 3.7
Thanks a lot in advance

Answer 1

What you can do is :
Open a browser and go to www.google.com
Next to the reload page button, you will see a lock (see picture below). click on it
Click on : Certificat
Click on the tab: Certification Path
Select Zsclaer Root CA5 and the click on View Certificat button
Click on the tab: Details and then click on Copy to file button
Export the certificat choosing the base-64 encoded X.509 (.CER)
Choose a path where to save the file
Open Anaconda Prompt
conda config -set ssl_verify path_of_the_file_that_you_just_saved

Answer 2

background
I had this same issue, but ran into a similar with my work laptop except where Zscaler blocked my curl, git, and anaconda traffic. The temporary fix was to disable ssl verification, but this introduces a number of security vulnerabilities such as man-in-the-middle attacks.
From what I could gather and my limited research, WSL2 doesn't have a automatic way of importing ssl certificates from the system.
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5134
Solution
The long term solution is to get the Zscaler certificate and add it to your shell file. Run the following commands in WSL after getting the certificate and navigating to the directory.
echo "export SSL_CERT_FILE=<Path to Certificate>/ZscalerRootCA.pem" >> $HOME/.bashrc
which I got from
https://help.zscaler.com/zia/adding-custom-certificate-application-specific-trusted-store#curl-SSL_CERT_FILE
They have more commands for other applications
If you use any other shells, make sure to change .bashrc to the directory of the configuration of that file. In my case I use fish, so I replaced $HOME/.bashrc with $HOME/.config/fish/config.fish
echo "export SSL_CERT_FILE=<Path to Certificate>/ZscalerRootCA.pem" >> $HOME/.config/fish/config.fish
After adding the certificate, make sure to reload the shell. In my case, I ran using instructions from jeffmcneil
source ~/.config/fish/config.fish
for bash, you would want to run
source ~/.bashrc
or
. ~/.bashrc
from
https://stackoverflow.com/a/2518150/16150356

Answer 3

Solution for Windows OS
After your Zscaler root cert is installed in the Windows trust root store, just install pip-system-certs the successor to python-certifi-win32 which is no longer maintained. Both packages are available from either pypi or conda-forge, so use either pip, conda, or mamba to install pip-system-certs into every Python environment in which you use the Requests package. The pip-system-certs package patches certifi at runtime to use the Windows trusted root store. This solves the issue for the requests package without resorting to setting $REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE and/or editing your cacert.pem files.
Solution for Ubuntu
Copy the Zscaler root certificate file, it must have .crt ending and be in PEM format, to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and use sudo update-ca-certificates to update your /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt file. However, even then, pip-system-certs doesn't quite seem to work, so add export $REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt to your .profile and restart your shell.
For more information read the following:
Requests uses the certifi CA Certificate bundle
Certifi, a "carefully curated" bundle of CA certs
install CA certificate in Ubuntu trusted root store
Zscaler help, adding custom certificate root stores
installing custom root stores
WARNING: I do not recommend editing any Python cacert.pem files. Note that they are all linked so editing one edits all, and your mamba/conda solver may complain that your package cache is invalid because the file size changed due to your edits. Look in each environments ssl/ folder including base env, and in the base env's pkgs/ca-certificates-<date> files. On Windows OS, cacert.pem is in Library\ssl instead of ssl/. Finally the cacert.pem file will be overwritten if/when you install or update the Python certifi package, so editing it is really not the ideal solution. A better alternative would be to put your Zscaler root cert in a new ssl/ folder in your home directory and set $REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE to that location. If your company is using Zscaler, then I think it's the only root cert you need.