Making HTTPS outbound calls from mule

In the Getting markup from HTTPS connection in Java program entry i talked about how to make HTTPS call from stand alone java application. Recently i had to figure out how to make HTTPS call from Mule as part of flow, and these are the steps that i followed

1. First step is to download the certificate for the site, but the InstallCert.java is no available on Oracle blog, instead i had to download it from here
2. The next step is to compile the InstallCert.java by executing javac InstallCert.java
3. One issue in using the trust store with Mule is that the password for the trust store file should be not null. So i had to execute the InstallCert command with changeit as password (same as oracle java's default password) like this java InstallCert wpcertification.blogspot.com changeit
4. After executing last step you should see jssecacerts file in your local directory, that is your trust store file
5. Next step is to create a HTTP connector in mule and while configuring go to security tab, check Enable HTTPS and configure the trust store to point to the jssecacerts file created in the last step and use changeit as password
   
6. Last step is to add HTTP call in your flow, while adding that call use the HTTP connector that you configured in the previous step
   
7. Now you can go ahead and test the flow and you should be able to make HTTPS call

Getting markup from HTTPS connection in Java program

One of the common requirements in J2EE is making a request to HTTP URL and getting response back. The JDK has support to make HTTP call and get response, you dont have to use any external library if you dont want to but (But most of us use Apache HTTP Client).

This sample code demonstrates how you can make a HTTP call to http://wpconnections1.atech.com/ and get and print response back to the console

package com.webspherenotes.ssl;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;

public class HelloSSL {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
      URL url = new URL("http://wpconnections1.atech.com/");
      
      // Open the URL: throws exception if not found
      HttpURLConnection conn = 
       (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
      conn.connect();
      InputStream inputStream = conn.getInputStream();
      BufferedReader reader = 
   new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream));
      String line = null;
      while((line = reader.readLine()) != null){
        System.out.println(line);
      }
    } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
      e.printStackTrace(System.out);
    } catch (IOException e) {
      e.printStackTrace(System.out);
    }
  }
}

This program works but you might want to access the same URL on HTTPs instead of HTTP, This program will work if you try to access say https://encrypted.google.com. But, In development environment we use self-signed SSL certificate and your JVM would not trust the self-signed SSL certificate. So when you try to connect to http://wpconnections1.atech.com/ it will throw this exception

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
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Handshaker.fatalSE(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Handshaker.fatalSE(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.ClientHandshaker.serverCertificate(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.ClientHandshaker.processMessage(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Handshaker.processLoop(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Handshaker.process_record(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.performInitialHandshake(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(Unknown Source)
    at sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsClient.afterConnect(Unknown Source)
    at sun.net.www.protocol.https.AbstractDelegateHttpsURLConnection.connect(Unknown Source)
    at sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsURLConnectionImpl.connect(Unknown Source)
    at com.webspherenotes.ssl.HelloSSL.main(HelloSSL.java:23)
Caused by: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid 
certification path to requested target
    at sun.security.validator.PKIXValidator.doBuild(Unknown Source)
    at sun.security.validator.PKIXValidator.engineValidate(Unknown Source)
    at sun.security.validator.Validator.validate(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.X509TrustManagerImpl.validate(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.X509TrustManagerImpl.checkServerTrusted(Unknown Source)
    at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.X509TrustManagerImpl.checkServerTrusted(Unknown Source)
    ... 12 more
Caused by: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid
 certification path to requested target
    at sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilder.engineBuild(Unknown Source)
    at java.security.cert.CertPathBuilder.build(Unknown Source)
    ... 18 more

You will have to follow some additional steps to import the self signed SSL certificate in your JVM so that it trust it. There are multiple ways to do that but the one that i like is outlined here http://blogs.sun.com/andreas/entry/no_more_unable_to_find, first i had to download the InstallCert.java on my machine and package it into a .jar file then i executed


java -jar InstallCert.jar wpconnections1.atech.com


This will create a jssecacert file on your machine where you executed the InstallCert.jar. In my case i did execute the .jar in c:\temp so i did create a C:\Temp\jssecacert file in that directory. This file has the imported certificate for wpconnections1.atech.com

Then i went back to my program and i did execute it by adding following JVM argument -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore="c:\temp\jssecacerts" like this


Now when i run the HelloSSL program i can see response being returned