Hi Jeff,
As far as I understand it, at least a server certificate is required for
SSL. The server certificate doesn't have to be issued by a known
authority (e.g. you can use a certificate you create, signed by itself),
but it has to be there.
This is required as the certificate gives the client the server's public
key, and normally then the client gets to work out whether they trust
the certificate based on who signed it and whether they are trusted.
Once they work out they trust the cert (and therefore the public key),
they can use it to communicate securely with the server using public-key
cryptography. This secure channel is used only to establish a shared
symmetric cipher key, and then the connection uses the faster symmetric
encryption to run the rest of the connection.
So to my knowledge, you can't cut out the certificate from the
protocol. It's an essential step. You can make it easier to work with
by not requiring a valid certificate, or, more commonly, setting up a
certificate authority of your own (not that hard with keytool) and
adding that certificate to your Java Runtime's cacerts file. This means
the minimum amount of code changes. If you don't want to fiddle with
files in the JRE/JDK, the alternative is writing custom trust validation
classes that will accept your own certificates.
cheers,
Will
Jeff Garrett wrote:
Hi.
I have looked over most of the mail archives and found a couple of posts
that are kind of what I want to do, but were not quite in-line with my
project or did not do what I needed. So, I need some help with something.
I want to send an HTTPS Post message using SSL so that it is encrypted. I
am currently using HttpClient 3.0.1 and that has worked like a charm for
sending HTTP Post messages without encryption. But, now I need to do be
able to send encrypted messages too. So, now I send to https://host:1001,
whereas before I was sending to http://host:1000, for example.
The catch is, and this should make it easier, that I do NOT need to, nor
want to, use certificates for authentication. I don't care who the receiver
of the message is - all I want is to send an encrypted message to a host and
port number I have stored. I know this is not the most secure setup, but in
this scenario this is the only requirement - clients subscribe and are
stored, and I send an encrypted message to each client and move onto the
next task. Its an asynchronus event that rarely happens.
As I said, this should be easier than having to deal with certificates.
However, almost every online reference I found has certificates included and
I was unable to find a way to modify the examples and get them to work w/o
certificates. I am not finding the right info, or not using the proper
info. The SSL guide was helpful, but all of the implemented
classes resulted in some form of exception.
This can be done right? Can someone please provide some information for how
to go about doing this?
I apologize if this is available somewhere - I have yet to see it.
Jeff G.
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