What are you using to do the HTTPS transfer?

I'm using LWP (libwww-perl) with Crypt::SSLeasy (lib-crypt-ssleay-perl on Debian), and if I say:

 HEAD -x https://db.debian.org/

I get some headers back in the response, e.g.:

Client-SSL-Cert-Issuer: /C=US/ST=Georgia/L=Atlanta/O=Debian/OU=LDAP/CN=db.debian.org/Email=debian-admin@lists.debian.org
Client-SSL-Cert-Subject: /C=US/ST=Georgia/L=Atlanta/O=Debian/OU=LDAP/CN=db.debian.org/Email=debian-admin@lists.debian.org
Client-SSL-Cipher: EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA
Client-SSL-Warning: Peer certificate not verified

I strongly recommend reading the Crypt::SSLeay documentation.

So, to use this in a more substantive example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

require 5.6.0;
use strict;
use LWP;

our $hostname = shift or die "Syntax: $0 hostname\n";
our $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
our $req = HTTP::Request->new(HEAD => "https://$hostname");
our $resp = $ua->request($req);

print "           Site: ", $resp->header('Client-SSL-Cert-Subject'), "
+\n";
print "Cert. Authority: ", $resp->header('Client-SSL-Cert-Issuer'), "\
+n";
print "         Cipher: ", $resp->header('Client-SSL-Cipher'), "\n";
[download]

and then you should be able to run this script with the hostname of an SSL site as a parmaeter, e.g. "www.verisign.com". HTH