Skip to main content

How to import an untrusted website certificate to the Java keystore

Java uses the keystore file named cacerts. It should already contain all trusted root CA certificates that are used to sign intermediate and leaf certificates. Leaf certificates are end user certificates that are used to secure websites with HTTPS. However, sometimes a root CA certificate might be missing from the Java keystore or a website might be using a self-signed certificate which will result in the following exception when you try to access the website from Java code: 
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
For me it happened with a certificate issued by COMODO. In this case the easiest solution is to add the website certificate to the Java keystore. Shortly, it requires exporting the certificate from the website, importing it into the keystore and restarting your Java application.
Please bear in mind that importing a self-signed certificate this way will merely hide the security issue and not solve it. So you should always use reliable trusted certificates on Production, for example, there are free ones issued by Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority.
  1. Export website certificate.
  2. Import certificate to Java keystore.
  3. Combined script.
Export website certificate
The following command will save the website certificate to a local file provided you set $HOST and $PORT variables accordingly: 
echo -n | openssl s_client -connect $HOST:$PORT | sed -ne '/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p' > $HOST.cert

Import certificate to Java keystore
The following command will import the certificate $FILE with the alias $NAME in the cacerts Java keystore where "changeit" is the default password. 
keytool -keystore cacerts -importcert -alias $NAME -file $FILE -storepass changeit

Combined script
Finally let's combine it into a nice script to speed up the process. We'll create a script named import_certificate.sh. 
#!/bin/sh

HOST=$1
PORT=$2

echo -n | openssl s_client -connect $HOST:$PORT | sed -ne '/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p' > $HOST.cert
name=`echo $HOST | tr '.' '_'`
echo keytool -keystore cacerts -importcert -alias $name -file $HOST.cert -storepass changeit
Now in order to fix the issue with untrusted certificate, just run it the following way: 
import_certificate.sh www.website.com 443
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connection to Amazon Neptune endpoint from EKS during development

This small article will describe how to connect to Amazon Neptune database endpoint from your PC during development. Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service from Amazon. Due to security reasons direct connections to Neptune are not allowed, so it's impossible to attach a public IP address or load balancer to that service. Instead access is restricted to the same VPC where Neptune is set up, so applications should be deployed in the same VPC to be able to access the database. That's a great idea for Production however it makes it very difficult to develop, debug and test applications locally. The instructions below will help you to create a tunnel towards Neptune endpoint considering you use Amazon EKS - a managed Kubernetes service from Amazon. As a side note, if you don't use EKS, the same idea of creating a tunnel can be implemented using a Bastion server . In Kubernetes we'll create a dedicated proxying pod. Prerequisites. Setting up a tunnel.
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on upgrade to JSF 2.1, Servlet 3.0, Spring 4.0, RichFaces 4.3

This article is devoted to an upgrade of a common JSF Spring application. Time flies and there is already Java EE 7 platform out and widely used. It's sometimes said that Spring framework has become legacy with appearance of Java EE 6. But it's out of scope of this post. Here I'm going to provide notes about the minimal changes that I found required for the upgrade of the application from JSF 1.2 to 2.1, from JSTL 1.1.2 to 1.2, from Servlet 2.4 to 3.0, from Spring 3.1.3 to 4.0.5, from RichFaces 3.3.3 to 4.3.7. It must be mentioned that the latest final RichFaces release 4.3.7 depends on JSF 2.1, JSTL 1.2 and Servlet 3.0.1 that dictated those versions. This post should not be considered as comprehensive but rather showing how I did the upgrade. See the links for more details. Jetty & Tomcat. JSTL. JSF & Facelets. Servlet. Spring framework. RichFaces. Jetty & Tomcat First, I upgraded the application to run with the latest servlet container versio
1 comment
Read more

Extracting XML comments with XQuery

I've just discovered that it's possible to process comment nodes using XQuery. Ideally it should not be the case if you take part in designing your data formats, then you should simply store valuable data in plain xml. But I have to deal with OntoML data source that uses a bit peculiar format while export to XML, i.e. some data fields are stored inside XML comments. So here is an example how to solve this problem. XML example This is an example stub of one real xml with irrelevant data omitted. There are several thousands of xmls like this stored in Sedna XML DB collection. Finally, I need to extract the list of pairs for the complete collection: identifier (i.e. SOT1209 ) and saved timestamp (i.e. 2012-12-12 23:58:13.118 GMT ). <?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <!--EXPORT_PROGRAM:=eptos-iso29002-10-Export-V10--> <!--File saved on: 2012-12-12 23:58:13.118 GMT--> <!--XML Schema used: V099--> <cat:catalogue xmlns:cat=
Post a Comment
Read more