Pulse Cookie

Pulse Cookie is a minimal web GUI that helps you connect to Pulse Connect Secure VPN servers that require Web-based multi-factor authentication (SSO/SAML). This script is intended to be used in conjunction with the OpenConnect VPN CLI client using the --protocol=nc option.

You might want to use this script if:

• your organization uses the Pulse Connect Secure VPN with multi-factor authentication (MFA) that requires you to enter credentials into a web GUI
• you want to avoid using the official (proprietary) Pulse Connect Secure VPN client application

Usage

1. Run the provided script: get-pulse-cookie [-n <cookie-name>] <server-url>.
2. The URL will open in a new Qt WebEngine browser window.
3. Log on using your organization's SSO/SAML procedure. This should store the authentication cookie <cookie-name> (you need to know this name in advance!)
4. When the cookie is stored, the Web UI closes and the value of the cookie is printed to stdout.
5. You can then use the value of the cookie to connect to the server using OpenConnect: sudo openconnect --protocol nc -C <cookie-name>=<cookie-value> <server-url>

Example

If my organization's Pulse Connect Secure VPN server is https://vpn.jh.edu/Linux and the name of the authentication cookie it stores is DSID, I can run get-pulse-cookie -n DSID "https://vpn.jh.edu/Linux", which will print the cookie to stdout.

Installation

External dependency

You will need to install Qt WebEngine, which provides the web GUI for the authentication workflow. On Arch Linux, this is provided by the qt6-webengine package.

This script

This is a standard Python package that can be installed using pip, perhaps directly from this repository as pip install <url-of-this-repo>.