How can SSL be turned on on SIM868E? - ssl

We are using the SIM868E module for connection via GSM, with internal communication over UART.
We need the SIM868E module to communicate with an HTTPS server, (using SSL), however after sending the commands AT+HTTPSSL=?, AT+HTTPSSL=1 or AT+CIPSSL=? the SIM868E module responds:
+CME Error: unknown
(with CMEE level 2).
The specs note that SSL/TLS are supported by this module: (https://simcom.ee/modules/gsm-gprs-gnss/sim868e/).
The firmware on the chip (requested using AT+CGMR) is Revision:1418B02SIM868E32_BLE_EAT.
How can we fix this problem?

According to 2019 SIMCom products catalogue it seems that for SIM868E device there's not support for TLS feature (TLS is the standard name for the SSL protocol).
Just in case the link becomes unreachable, I attach a screenshot of the relevant page of the document:
as you can see, TLS dot is "empty".
Nevertheless, I have to say that SIMCom documents are sometimes contradictory and confusing: in fact in the SIM868E flier claims that the SSL SW feature is supported, but in the SIM800 series AT command manual there's no mention of SSL AT commands.
I will update in case I find any new piece of information about it.
I would honestly avoid trying strange things like flashing the SW of another module. It would be like searching for trouble. And in your case you would lose your positioning capabilities (GPS/GNSS).
Talking about your issue in particular, you'll probably have to compile an SSL library on your host processor (for SSL handshake and data encryption) using the TCP/HTTP commands of your device to transport data to the server. It's not a simple job.

Related

Libwebsockets: keep SSL context disabled and provide one from the modem

I've recently been passed an embedded project where an MCU uses libwebsockets (version 3.1.0) to setup a websockets client. The MCU is connected to a SIMCOM modem for 4g connectivity.
Up until now the communication was non-secured: SSL context not set and modem configured to provide just a TCP link to the server. The server URI was a wss one, but security was not enforced.
I've now been asked to set the communication to use SSL/TLS with server and client authentication.
Having never used libwebsockets before and being short on time, my idea was to:
a) Leave libwebsockets set as it was, so with no SSL context set up.
b) Configure the modem to creat an SSL/TLS context and connect to the server through that one.
I did this and I can see my device sending the request to switch from http to websockets protocol, as well as the server's successful reply (code 101). But my problem is that the server's reply never gets processed by libwebsockets and the connection is dropped after a few seconds.
I can se3 that the bytes that make up the server's reply are received by the modem and passed into the MCU's buffer used to pass data into libwebsockets, but then the library never calls its net_recv method to actually read from such buffer.
Also, libwebsockets is currently built with TLS support and uses mbedTLS as SSL/TLS library. But, as said about, SSL context is currently left disabled (ssl_connection in the connection info struct is left set to 0).
So, I was wondering:
Is my approach something that can work at all? Or should I setup the SSL context from libwebsockets and let the modem setup just a TCP connection?
If I were to setup the SSL context from libwebsockets, is there a way to pass certificates and keys tot the library as just C arrays? Or do I have to have them stored as files on a filesystem and then pass their paths to the lib?
Also, I should add that the MCU has a second connection to the server, an HTTPS one, that one too setup with client and server authentication and that works with no problems at all. Therfore, I'm sure that the modem is correctly configured.
If needed, I will be able to provide more info on library configuration and used from Monday, because I'm currently travelling and don't have access to the code. But I wanted to get the ball rolling.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Yesterday, finally I had time to look at the code again. It turns out that the problem was in my code (this was always a strong possibility).
The local implementation of the net_send had a bug and returned always negative values. Thus, libwebsockets thought that the HTTP request to switch protocol had failed and hence was closing down the connection.
So, to answer the two questions above:
Yes, it's possible to setup libwebsockets to not handle SSL/TLS and then provide a SSL/TLS connection from a lower layer (the modem in my case).
It is possible to store certificates and keys in C arrays of bytes and pass them to libwebsockets if you create a custom platform implementation for your platform and create a custom implementation of POSIX like methods (open, close, read, etc).
By default the library expects to work on a POSIX like filesystem, though. So, realising a custom implementation can be a bit of a job.
The above is true for libwebsockets version 3.1.0. I haven't used any other version of the library, so things might have changed since then.
All in all, I think that configuring libwebsockets to handle SSL and the TLS handshake and then provide it with only a TCP connection is the best way of using the library.
I chose a different strategy for the wrong reasons (tight deadline + not being familiar with the codebase), but I'm definitely planning on reviewing my approach at a later date.

Google cloud datafusion how to accept self-signed certificates

We are just starting to use google cloud data fusion for our ETL.
We have a use case to hit a server(self-signed) and get some info using the http-plugin in the data fusion product.
In my pipeline, i am turning off SSL verification to accept any certificates but getting an error
javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: Certificate for <on000120.aeo.ae.com> doesn't match any of the subject alternative names: []
Help text for the field also suggests to urn it off. See image.
Could someone please help?
I followed the instructions at https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-get-https-working-on-your-local-development-environment-in-5-minutes-7af615770eec/ to generate the key and crt files, so I had a file called v3.ext (which includes subjectAltName) and used that to generate the server.crt file. When I started my server with these files, I was able to deploy and run a pipeline using HTTP source from that local HTTPS server. How did you generate your crt and key? Would you please describe the plugins you're using?
I assume that issue that you've reported is not connected with Data Fusion runtime environment, but might be supposedly related the target HTTPS web server SSL/TLS configuration. Most of the time this issue occurs when the common name or SAN(Subject Alternative Name) of your SSL/TLS Certificate does not match the domain or address that you hit in HTTP call, hence this page is not listed in SAN's list and I can suppose that you didn't add any of domain names there.
As far as I know Data Fusion http-plugin, which is based on Java HTTP Client implementation, promotes HostnameVerifier class, that is used for URL's hostname and the server's identification hostname verification during establishing handshake between parties, you may take a look at the source code and find inherited method getDefaultHostnameVerifier() as well. Therefore, this can lead to the error, during http client intentions to launch SSL/TLS connection channel.
Even though, you turned of trust keystore certificate inspection in the plugin settings, the issue will persist because hostname validation still failing.

gnutls and openssl handshake in NGINX

I'm testing SSL/TLS stream proxying within NGINX that will connect to a web server using gnutls as the underlying TLS API. Using the command line test tool in gnutls (gnutls-serv) the entire process works, but I can't understand the logic:
the NGINX client (proxying HTTP requests from an actual client to the gnutls server) seems to want to handshake the connection multiple times. In fact in most tests it seems to handshake 3 times without error before the server will respond with a test webpage. Using wireshark, or just debugging messages, it looks like the socket on the client side (in the perspective of the gnutls server) is being closed and reopened on different ports. Finally on the successful connection, gnutls uses a resumed sessions, which I imagine is one of the previously mentioned successful handshakes.
I am failing to find any documentation about this sort of behaviour, and am wondering if this is just an 'NGINX thing.'
Though the handshake eventually works with the test programs, it seems kind of wasteful (to have multiple expensive handshakes) and implementing handshake logic in a non-test environment will be tricky without actually understanding what the client is trying to do.
I don't think there are any timeouts or problems happening on the transport, the test environment is a few different VMs on the same subnet connected between 1 switch.
NGINX version is the latest mainline: 1.11.7. I was originally using 1.10.something, and the behaviour was similar though there were more transport errors. Those errors seemed to get cleaned up nicely with upgrading.
Any info or experience from other people is greatly appreciated!
Use either RSA key exchange between NGINX and the backend server or use SSLKEYLOGFILE LD_PRELOAD for NGINX to have the necessary data for Wireshark to decrypt the data.
While a single incoming connection should generate just one outgoing connection, there may be some optimisations in NGINX to fetch common files (favicon.ico, robots.txt).

Can I detect the SSL version that a browser supports?

I would like to display a message to customers who's browser's highest level of encryption is SSLv3. Is it possible for me to target browser settings of SSLv3 and lower? Client or Server code? We will be allowing lower versions of SSL to use our site during a certain grace period. During this grace period, we would like to display a message only to those users that have browser settings of SSL3 or lower.
Not easily. The browser's supported SSL versions are not detectable until the SSL handshake is in progress, and even then only if the browser uses an SSLv2 handshake to allow dynamic version negotiation. If an unsupported version were detected, you would not be able to send a message back since the handshake failed and the connection would be closed before you could send any message. However, SSL itself has an error packet that gets sent during handshaking, and it can specify a version mismatch error.
The best you can do in your own code is support all SSL versions on the server side, let the client complete a handshake normally, and then detect which version was actually used and send back a message if the SSL version is too low.
Or, you could simply enable TLSv1 or higher only, and simply refuse to let older clients connect at all. They just would not get a nice error message unless the browser decided to detect the SSL version mismatch error and display its own pretty message about it.
Firstly, nowadays, you can generally forget about clients that don't support at least SSLv3. SSLv3 has been widely available for many years.
The TLS Client Hello message, sent when the connection is initiated by the browser, should contain the highest TLS version it supports:
client_version
The version of the TLS protocol by which the client wishes to
communicate during this session. This SHOULD be the latest
(highest valued) version supported by the client. For this
version of the specification, the version will be 3.3 (see
Appendix E for details about backward compatibility).
Appendix E is of course worth looking at.
(The Client Hello message will also contain the list of cipher suites the client supports, which is possibly relevant for the general idea of your question.)
Of course, this specification is just a "SHOULD", so a client supporting TLS 1.2 could still send a Client Hello for TLS 1.1, but what would be the point? By doing so it would have no chance ever to use TLS 1.2 anyway. It could be a preference box that is turned off, but that would effectively make it a client that doesn't support the highest version anyway. (If you want anything more subtle, you'd need to build a database of known user agents, which will be partly unreliable, and for which you'd need to analyse the full user agent string to know everything possible about the platform.)
Now, how to convey the content of the Client Hello message to your application is another matter, and depends very much on which SSL/TLS stack you use. It might not even be directly possible without modifying that SSL/TLS library or the server you're using.
This being said, you can generally get the negotiated TLS version during the current session quite easily. Since that version is the "lower of that suggested by the client in the client hello and the highest supported by the server" (i.e. "min(max(client), max(server))"). If your server supports SSLv3, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2, and since the latest version is TLS 1.2 anyway, what you'll get during your current connection will also be the max currently supported by the client. As long as your server supports the latest version, you should be able to know what the client supports at best from any live connection.
If you're behind Apache HTTP server's mod_ssl, you should be able to get that from the SSL_PROTOCOL environment variable. You should also be able to get the protocol from the SSLSession in Java.
(If you are willing to write a more bespoke service, you could pass further details like the cipher suites more directly to your application, like this service from Qualys SSL Labs does, although I'm not sure if it's meant to be widely available or just a test service.)
I'd have to agree with Remy about it being a bit challenging.
However, a good starting point may be to retrieve some SSL (certificate) information.
Something similar to this:
X509Certificate certChain[] =
(X509Certificate[]) req.getAttribute("javax.net.ssl.peer_certificates");
Another way of getting more information is to retrieve the cipher_suite attribute (similar to the code snippet above).
javax.net.ssl.cipher_suite
I hope this (at least) gets you closer.
Good luck.

SSL handshake issue while java client talking to SSLv3 ONLY server

We are facing a problem and I am sure this is the right place. We have a load balancer (cisco's) and for various reasons the SSL configuration on the load balancer (the server) side is set to use "SSLv3" protocol version. Now after setting the same, when I access the load balancer in CHROME browser, I am able to access the pages but I do see the below message when I click on their security icon.
"connection had to be retried using ssl 3.0" - I looked at the packet capture using wireshark and I see that browser tries TLSv1 and receives a "fatal alert" from the server saying "protocol_version" and then immediately browser tries SSLv3 version and finishes the handshake. So browser is able to negotiate this as a client.
However when I set up a stand alone java (tried using 1.6 as well as 1.7) client from eclipse and try connecting to the server I am getting the below exception.
: Received fatal alert: protocol_version javax.net.ssl.SSLException: Received fatal alert: protocol_version
As per various documentations, I saw two options I have
to set https.protocol system property to SSLv3. [this works for us, but the problem is it is affects the outbound SSL calls globally. I have another outbound SSL call to another server which does not work with SSLv3]
setEnabledprotocols() - this works as well but sometimes, we dont have access to the socket directly (sometime we generates stubs using third party and the stub takes care of the low level connection stuff, so no access to that socket).
But my actual question is, If by default TLSv1/SSLv3 and SSLv2Hello(just the format I believe) are enabled in java, why is JSSE implementation not able to negotiate like how chrome browser is able to negotiate. Is this expected? If browser is doing it, I believe it should be part of some SSL RFC and if that is the case, same functionality of this "negotiation" should be provided by java itself right?
I did go through this http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/jdk/openjdk/6-b14/sun/security/ssl/SSLSocketImpl.java and was not able to find any part for this negotiation during handshake.
Is there a possibility of issue from the server side (load balancer) that i. I see that server sends fatal alert but that being cisco I believe the ssl implementation should be perfect and that is expected. Am I wrong?
Issue happens both in java 1.6 and 1.7. Do let me know if more information would be required to answer, will be happy to help.