Error: unable to verify the first certificate - Springboot - spring-boot

I have written a restful API project which is developed using spring boot and I am using the embedded tomcat and running a jar on a linux server.
The APIs are live at:
https://api.arevogroup.com:8089/api/regions
and I can see the verified and correct SSL as well as in the given screenshot.
but I am getting an this exception in the postman when I call these apis.
These APIs are consumed by a Xamrin based app which seems to work all good when consumed using iPhone but gives this same exception when the APIs are accessed via android.
I guess, the way I have generated the ssl certificate has some issues.
I have used a pfx file and my SSL config in properties file looks like this:
###SSL Key Info
security.require-ssl=true
server.ssl.key-store-password=PASSWORD
server.ssl.key-store=classpath:ssl_pfx.pfx
server.ssl.key-store-type=PKCS12
I have 2 questions, if disable the ssl verification, would the communication still be encrypted or not? (man in the middle attack is still possible but the info will still be encrypted, right?).
If not, how can I fix this?

You can't disable the verification of the server certificate. No browser will allow you to do it, except on an exceptional basis (the user must confirm the exception). If the client disables the verification, than the communication will be encrypted (i.e. no passive attack will be possible).
The errors you see are cause by a misconfiguration of your server.
Your certificate chain contains just the certificate for your server and lacks the intermediate certificate CN=Go Daddy Secure Certificate Authority - G2. You need to download it from Go Daddy (it is the one named gdig2.crt.pem) and add it to your keystore.
Refer to this question on how to do it.
Some browsers cache intermediate certificates and are able to verify your site even if one certificate is missing. However you should not rely on it.

security.require-ssl=true
server.ssl.key-store-password=PASSWORD
server.ssl.key-store=keystore.jks
server.ssl.key-store-provider=SUN
server.ssl.key-store-type=JKS
Used the jks file instead of pfx and it worked all good. Thought to share with others too.

Related

Guzzle disabling certificate verification to false, how insecure is it?

Recently I found myself working with Guzzle while making requests to another server to post and fetch some data, in some cases, tokens. But I was getting certificate invalid error and I even tried to get a new .pem certificate, but Guzzle was still not accepting and kept throwing that error. So finally, I did what the "Internet" said:
$guzzleClient = new Client([
'verify' => false
]);
Now although this solution works, I am not sure how insecure it can get. Do I need to worry? If yes, in what scenarios?
well this is a big problem if you are for example
having login system on the request you are sending using guzzle
having payment/checkout on the request
basically any sensitive data being passed to the other server
because when you pass data without SSL certificate then your requests might get caught by malicious programs like
BurbSuite / WireShark , cain and abel / EtterCap
as these programs are Sniffing programs and anyone can get a version from the internet as they are open sourced and every thing going without SSL can be intercepted by the hacker using the tools mentioned above and the hacker can look to the entire request in plaintext! so its highly recommended to use SSL connection when passing sensitive data
Worth Mentioning : now a days even SSL isn't very secure because hackers can remove it using SSLStrip tool but believe me SSL will make it much harder for them to get to your request because if they used it your website sometimes will make non-completed requests and it will notify the user that the network isn't secure this will make it very hard for the hacker to get the user's data,
TLS/SSL in common configurations is meant to give you three things:
confidentiality - no third party is able to read the messages sent and received,
integrity - no third party is able to modify the messages sent and received,
server authentication - you know who are you talking to.
What you do with setting verify to false is disabling the certificate verification. It immediately disables the server authentication feature and enables loosing confidentiality and integrity too when facing an active attacker that has access to your data stream.
How is that?
First of all TLS/SSL relieas on Public Key Infrastructure. Without going into too much details: you hold on your machine a set of certificates of so called Certification Authorities (CA) whom you trust. When you open a new communication to a service, you get the services certificates and in the process of verification you validate amongst other things if the certificate belongs to a CA you trust. If yes, then the communication may proceed. If no, then the communication channel is closed.
Attack patterns
Disabling certificate verification allows for Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks than can easily be performed in your local network (e.g. via ARP poisoning attacks), in the local network of the service you are calling or in the network between. As we usually do not trust the network completely, we tend to verify.
Imagine me performing an attack on you. I have performed ARP poisoning, now I can see all your traffic. It's encrypted, isn't it? Well, not obviously. The TCP handshake and TLS handshake you believe you have performed with the target service - you have performed with me. I have presented you not the certificate of the target service, as I am unable to fake it, but my own. But you did not validate it to reject it. I have opened a connection between me and the target service on your behalf too so I can look into the decrypted traffic, modify if necessary and reply to you to make you believe everything is ok.
First of all - all your secrets are belong to me. Second of all - I am able to perform attacks on both you and the target service (which might have been secured by authentication mechanisms, but now is not).
How to fix this?
In XXI century there should be little reason to disable TLS verification anywhere. Configuring it to work properly might be a pain though, even more when you are doing it for the first time. From my experience the most common issues in the micro service world are:
the target certificate is self-signed,
you are missing a CA root certificate in your trust store,
the microservice does provide his certificate, but does not provide an intermediate CA certificate.
It's hard to guess what your issue is. We would need to dig deeper.
While the other answers points out some really good point about how important SSL/TLS is, your connection is still encrypted and the remote endpoint you're using has https:// in it as well. So you're not entirely disabling SSL when you set verify to false if I'm not mistken. It's just less secure since that you're not verifying the certificate of the remote server if they are signed by a Certificate Authority (CA) using the CA bundle.
Do you need to worry?
If this is something on your production, ideally you'd want things to be secure and configured correctly, so yes.
By not verifying the certificate, like Marek Puchalski mentioned, there's possibility of the server might not be the one you think it is and allows mitm (man in the middle) attack as well. More about mitm here, and peer verification here.
Why is it happening & how do you fix it?
Most common issue is misconfigured server, especially PHP configuration. You can fix your PHP configuration following this guide, where you'll be using adding the CA root certificates bundle to your configuration. Alternatively you can add this to Guzzle.
Another common issue is, the remote server is using a self-signed certificate. Even if you configured your CA bundle in your trustedstore, this certificate can't be trusted since it's not signed by a trusted CA. So the server needs to configure a SSL certificated signed by a CA. If that's not possible, you can manually trust this CA root, however this comes with some security concerns as well.
Hope this helped :)

Identifying which certificate is needed in order to perform https post using Oracle utl_http

Short story
I'm trying to send a POST request from a PL/SQL script using the utl_http utility in Oracle. I've been able to send the request using http, but not https. I've added what I thought was the necessary certificates to a Oracle Wallet, and I believe they are being imported and used (but in all honesty, this is a little hard to verify). My current assumption is that calls from our DB server are passing through a proxy server, and that that is somehow messing up some part of the https / certificate functionality.
Supporting evidence (possibly?): I tried to make calls (POST requests) to a dummy service at webhook.site. Again, I got this working with http, but not https - the latter results in a cert validation error.
I then tried to replicate the behavior using postman, and that basically produces the same result, unless I fiddle around with the settings:
Initial Postman result:
Could not get any response
There was an error connecting to https://webhook.site/950...
Disabling SSL verification
Under the Post man settings, I turned off SSL Certificate Verification, and tried again. This time, I got a 200 OK response, and confirmed that the webhook received the post request fine.
It seems clear that the error is due to a missing cert, but I can't figure out which, or how to configure it. My assumption is that if I can get this to work for a webhook-url from Postman (without disabling cert verification), then I should also be able to get it to work from PL/SQL later.
When I look at the webhook site in a browser and inspect the certs, the webhook cert is the lowest cert (leaf node?). Above it there is one intermediate cert related to the company I'm working for, and then a root cert also related to the company. The root node is named something like "Company Proxy Server CA" - So I'm assuming the proxy somehow manipulates my requests and inserts it's own cert here.
I've tried downloading all of these certs and importing them into my cert store, as well as importing them under the Postman settings (under Certificates) in various combinations, but nothing seems to make any difference; all attempts at posting with HTTPS produces the following error in my Postman Console:
POST https://webhook.site/9505...
Error: unable to verify the first certificate
Any ideas about how to resolve this, or at least obtain more information about what to do would be greatly appreciated.
Switching OFF "SSL Certificate Verification" in Postman only means that it (i.e. Postman) will not check the validity of SSL certificates while making a request. Meaning that it will just send the certificates as they are. Because your connection fails if the setting in ON, this means Postman cannot verify the validity of your certificates.
This is most likely the case with the actual service you're trying to POST to, they cannot verify the certificates. Is that service outside your company network? And is it a public one or one owned by your company? Where is that service hosted? What certificate do they need?
BTW, TLS client certificates are sent as part of establishing the SSL connection, not as part of the HTTP request. The TLS handshake (and exchange/validation of client and server certificates) happens before any HTTP message is sent.
I'm thinking this might be a blocked port issue.
You said... ""Company Proxy Server CA" - So I'm assuming the proxy somehow manipulates my requests and inserts it's own cert here."
That means your client software needs your Company Proxy Server CA in its trusted certificates list. If that client's list is that of the oracle wallet...
https://knowledge.digicert.com/solution/SO979.html
This talks about how to do that.
Also, if your system running postman has a non-oracle based wallet trusted certificate (probably the operating system?) you'll have to execute something like adding the trust to your account on the workstation
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/manage-trusted-root-certificates-windows
in order to have the proxy server certificate trusted.
Once the certificate you're making the connection with has a root of trust per the effective configuration of the client being used, then you'll be able to verify the certificate.
A couple of possible issues:
The server doesn't actually support HTTPS. Connect a browser to the URL that you POST to, and see if you receive a response. (It looks like you already did this, but I'm documenting it for completeness.)
The server uses the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension to determine what certificate chain to send back, but your POSTing client doesn't send that extension. You can identify this case by looking up the IP for the host you're POSTing to, then going to https://nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn/ (obviously use the IP here, instead of the literal string 'nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn') in your browser, and checking the certificate chain it returns. If it is not the same as you get from step 1, this is your problem, and you need to figure out how to either get SNI support in your Oracle PL/SQL client or get the POST endpoint exposed on that hostname. (alternatively, you might be able to use these certificates to prime your Oracle Wallet, but they might have an issue with the hostname in the certificate not matching the hostname you connect to.)
You have a proxy in the way. I don't think this is what's going on, since that would basically only cause problems if you were doing client-side certificate authentication. (If this is the problem or is a condition, you need to import those certificates into your trusted wallet; you also need to ensure that the server you're posting from is going through the same proxy. Otherwise, you need to ensure that the certificate authority for the proxy that the machine actually running the code sees is in the wallet. This may require the assistance of the system/network administrators who run that machine and its connection to the network.)
HTTPS is a finicky beast. Many, many things must work exactly correctly for TLS connections to work and the certificates to correctly verify (the TLS port must respond, the client and server must agree to speak the same version of TLS, the client and server must agree to use the same cipher combination, the certificate chain presented by the server must be issued by a CA the client recognizes, and the leaf certificate in that chain must certify the name client requested).
SNI is needed to support multiple names on a single host without messing with the certifications of other names on the same host. Unfortunately, SNI is one of those things that has been standardized for over a decade (RFC 3546), but many enterprise-grade softwares haven't implemented.

How to Get Self Signed Certificate in Ec2

I am working in Ec2 instance. I have connected my php files like http://13.57.220.172/phpinsert.php. But it is not secured site. So i want to convert http into https://13.57.220.172.
I have cloudflare ssl. When i try to add ssl certificate. It shows
com.amazonaws.pki.acm.exceptions.external.ValidationException: Provided certificate is not a valid self signed. Please provide either a valid self-signed certificate or certificate chain. Choose Previous button below and fix it.
i have enclose the image with it.
So how can i get the self signed certificate. is there any online tool available.
I think the error message your seeing has to do with this sentence:
If your certificate is signed by a CA, you must include the
certificate chain when you import your certificate.
from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/import-certificate-prerequisites.html.
Since it sounds like you're not yet in "production" mode, I'm guessing you're not particularly attached to your existing certificate, but just want a certificate to be able to do HTTPS on your web server (and don't really care if it's self-signed).
If you want to use AWS Certificate Manager, I think it would be easier to just let them (AWS) issue you a certificate instead of trying to import one from somewhere else. AWS doesn't charge anything for certificates. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-billing.html
Even if you get the certificate setup in AWS Certificate Manager, that's not going to be installed directly on your EC2 instance, but rather (most likely) on a load balancer in front of your web server, which will add a little complexity to your setup. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-services.html
If all you want to do is use HTTPS on your web server, Let's Encrypt (also free) is probably a simpler option. If you are using AWS Linux 2, there are instructions for getting a certificate here - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/SSL-on-amazon-linux-2.html
Well, add to the points which #jefftrotman has already mentioned.
If your expectation is to just secure your IP address using HTTPS you can achieve that using the below approaches:
A SELF SIGNED certificate that you can create using OpenSSL.
You can also get an SSL certificate from a trust signing authority like (GoDaddy or VeriSign) or Let's encrypt.
The only requirement in the second point is that for getting a certificate from a valid signing authority you need to have a domain name like "myphpapp.com" and then use this domain to get the SSL certificate.
The below details are in case you want to use AWS ACM(Amazon Certificate Manager)
If you prefer ACM, you can get the free Public SSL certificate which you can map to the IP address and your web application will be secured.
If your requirement is to add SSL certificates (like PEM files) to a web server like
NGINX or Apache then you first need to create a Private CA using in ACM and then you using this CA you will be able to create Private SSL certificates. After creating those you can export the files and add those files to the configuration file. (try to use Amazon Linux 2) ec2 image for ease.

Why is Firefox saying that my website is using an "invalid security certificate"?

I have been using a wildcard SSL certificate for several of my company's B2B websites for some time. Recently, we noticed that Google Chrome started displaying a red unlocked lock with HTTPS crossed out for all of these websites. The solution I found was to reissue the certificate from the provider (Network Solutions). So, I did this, and updated the certificate for each of the websites, and the Google Chrome issue went away (HOORAY!). However, when visiting any of these websites in Firefox, it displays a security message stating the website is using an invalid security certificate:
How can I resolve this so that our users are not confused when visiting these websites?
P.S. These websites are running on IIS6.
It looks as if the certificate chain is incomplete and, thus, Firefox (and likely other browsers) cannot verify the site certificate. Normally browsers store intermediate certificates they have seen in the past - that might be a reason why it works in Chrome.
You can test using https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html.
Depending on the server software (here, for Apache httpd and other servers which read the certificate in PEM/DER format), you can just paste the intermediate certificates together with the certificate in one .pem file (which is used as Certificate file).
The chain (intermediate certificates) is/are normally provided by your CA. In your case you could also use Chrome the review the certificate and then store/extract all intermediate certificates from the certificate view.
You can get this certificate is not trusted error if server doesn't send a required intermediate certificate.
Firefox automatically stores intermediate certificates that servers send in the Certificate Manager for future usage.
If a server doesn't send a full certificate chain then you won't get an untrusted error when Firefox has stored missing intermediate certificates from visiting a server in the past that has send it, but you do get an untrusted error if this intermediate certificate isn't stored yet.
You can inspect the certificate chain via a site like this:
http://www.networking4all.com/en/support/tools/site+check/
I followed the instructions at enter link description here, to import the intermediate certificates.
In IIS, there is an option under Directory Security to "Enable certificate trust list". I enabled it and added the "AddTrust External CA Root" to the CTL certificates list and this appears to have fixed the issue.

Windows Store App connect to HTTPS with an self-signed SSL certificate

I'm having a Windows Store App (Metro App) which I want to connect a web service I built through HTTPS. And I am using a self-signed certificate for my web service. But when I tried to connect it from my App through System.Net.HttpClient.PostAsync I got an exception said
"The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel."
Inner exception said
"The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure."
I know this is because I'm using a self-signed certificate. I remembered in .NET I can use System.Net.ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback so that my application can pass the validation if the thumbprint is mine.
But I cannot find the relevant class/method in Windows Store runtime. How can I do that?
First, you should ideally be using Windows.Web.HttpClient. On that API, you can use httpClient.HttpBaseProtocolFilter.IgnorableServerCertificateErrors to set the cert errors that you're willing to accept. You can choose to ignore the Untrusted error, for example, but you should then manually check the thumbprint before actually sending any data.

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