Java SSLSocket handshake failure

Question

I'm trying to find a way to establish a connection beetwen a Java client and a C server using SSL.

This is the java client:

import java.io.BufferedWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;
import javax.net.ssl.SSLSocket;
import javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory;

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        SSLSocketFactory sslsockfact = 
            (SSLSocketFactory) SSLSocketFactory.getDefault();
        SSLSocket sslsocket = (SSLSocket) sslsockfact.createSocket(
            args[0], Integer.parseInt(args[1]));
        sslsocket.startHandshake();
        System.in.read();
    }
}

It's only a few functions to establish connection and perform handshake, but I'm getting this error:

Exception in thread "main" javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: 
  Received fatal alert: handshake_failure
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:174)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:136)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.recvAlert(
      SSLSocketImpl.java:1657)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(
      SSLSocketImpl.java:932)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.performInitialHandshake(
      SSLSocketImpl.java:1096)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(
      SSLSocketImpl.java:1123)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(
      SSLSocketImpl.java:1107)
    at posslu.Main.main(Main.java:22)
Java Result: 1

Unfortunately I don't have any sources of the server program - I only know the protocol. Is it even possible to connect java and C++ using ssl? AFAIK server is written using openssl.

Any help?

EDIT:

I'm connecting from Windows to Linux and server's using posix sockets.

Answer 1

Yes, it's definitely possible to communicate via SSL between Java and C.

The Java client code may be failing because it doesn't recognise the server certificate being sent.

You need to make sure that the server's certificate is present in the Java client's trust store.