How do I accept a self-signed certificate with a Java HttpsURLConnection?

Question

A module I'm adding to our large Java application has to converse with another company's SSL-secured website. The problem is that the site uses a self-signed certificate. I have a copy of the certificate to verify that I'm not encountering a man-in-the-middle attack, and I need to incorporate this certificate into our code in such a way that the connection to the server will be successful.

Here's the basic code:

void sendRequest(String dataPacket) {
  String urlStr = "https://host.example.com/";
  URL url = new URL(urlStr);
  HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
  conn.setMethod("POST");
  conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Length", data.length());
  conn.setDoOutput(true);
  OutputStreamWriter o = new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream());
  o.write(data);
  o.flush();
}

Without any additional handling in place for the self-signed certificate, this dies at conn.getOutputStream() with the following exception:

Exception in thread "main" javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target
....
Caused by: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target
....
Caused by: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target

Ideally, my code needs to teach Java to accept this one self-signed certificate, for this one spot in the application, and nowhere else.

I know that I can import the certificate into the JRE's certificate authority store, and that will allow Java to accept it. That's not an approach I want to take if I can help; it seems very invasive to do on all of our customer's machines for one module they may not use; it would affect all other Java applications using the same JRE, and I don't like that even though the odds of any other Java application ever accessing this site are nil. It's also not a trivial operation: on UNIX I have to obtain access rights to modify the JRE in this way.

I've also seen that I can create a TrustManager instance that does some custom checking. It looks like I might even be able to create a TrustManager that delegates to the real TrustManager in all instances except this one certificate. But it looks like that TrustManager gets installed globally, and I presume would affect all other connections from our application, and that doesn't smell quite right to me, either.

What is the preferred, standard, or best way to set up a Java application to accept a self-signed certificate? Can I accomplish all of the goals I have in mind above, or am I going to have to compromise? Is there an option involving files and directories and configuration settings, and little-to-no code?

Answer 1

We copy the JRE's truststore and add our custom certificates to that truststore, then tell the application to use the custom truststore with a system property. This way we leave the default JRE truststore alone.

The downside is that when you update the JRE you don't get its new truststore automatically merged with your custom one.

You could maybe handle this scenario by having an installer or startup routine that verifies the truststore/jdk and checks for a mismatch or automatically updates the truststore. I don't know what happens if you update the truststore while the application is running.

This solution isn't 100% elegant or foolproof but it's simple, works, and requires no code.

Answer 2

Create an SSLSocket factory yourself, and set it on the HttpsURLConnection before connecting.

...
HttpsURLConnection conn = (HttpsURLConnection)url.openConnection();
conn.setSSLSocketFactory(sslFactory);
conn.setMethod("POST");
...

You'll want to create one SSLSocketFactory and keep it around. Here's a sketch of how to initialize it:

/* Load the keyStore that includes self-signed cert as a "trusted" entry. */
KeyStore keyStore = ... 
TrustManagerFactory tmf = 
  TrustManagerFactory.getInstance(TrustManagerFactory.getDefaultAlgorithm());
tmf.init(keyStore);
SSLContext ctx = SSLContext.getInstance("TLS");
ctx.init(null, tmf.getTrustManagers(), null);
sslFactory = ctx.getSocketFactory();

If you need help creating the key store, please comment.

---

Here's an example of loading the key store:

KeyStore keyStore = KeyStore.getInstance(KeyStore.getDefaultType());
keyStore.load(trustStore, trustStorePassword);
trustStore.close();

To create the key store with a PEM format certificate, you can write your own code using CertificateFactory, or just import it with keytool from the JDK (keytool won't work for a "key entry", but is just fine for a "trusted entry").

keytool -import -file selfsigned.pem -alias server -keystore server.jks

Answer 3

I've had to do something like this when using commons-httpclient to access an internal https server with a self-signed certificate. Yes, our solution was to create a custom TrustManager that simply passed everything (logging a debug message).

This comes down to having our own SSLSocketFactory that creates SSL sockets from our local SSLContext, which is set up to have only our local TrustManager associated with it. You don't need to go near a keystore/certstore at all.

So this is in our LocalSSLSocketFactory:

static {
    try {
        SSL_CONTEXT = SSLContext.getInstance("SSL");
        SSL_CONTEXT.init(null, new TrustManager[] { new LocalSSLTrustManager() }, null);
    } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException("Unable to initialise SSL context", e);
    } catch (KeyManagementException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException("Unable to initialise SSL context", e);
    }
}

public Socket createSocket(String host, int port) throws IOException, UnknownHostException {
    LOG.trace("createSocket(host => {}, port => {})", new Object[] { host, new Integer(port) });

    return SSL_CONTEXT.getSocketFactory().createSocket(host, port);
}

Along with other methods implementing SecureProtocolSocketFactory. LocalSSLTrustManager is the aforementioned dummy trust manager implementation.