Amazon Secrets Manager, Java 7, and CipherSuites - ssl

Question

I am trying to get AWS Secrets Manager to work on an older Java 7 platform. Unfortunately we're locked on Java 7 for now.
The issue I have is that Java 7 had some security issues with SSL, and most modern Java platforms are using newer cipherSuites. Thus I get the error
javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: No negotiable cipher suite
In other interfaces I've been able to solve the issue by doing an .setEnabledCipherSuites on the SSL socket.
The problem here is that the Secrets Manager client does not expose the socket (AFAICT), nor does it expose the SocketFactory. I've been trying to create a new SSLContext wrapping the stock SSLContext that will provide a custom SocketFactory but creating and installing a custom SSLContext has proven to be quite complicated.
Before I end up pulling out the rest of my hair, is there an easier way to do this?
AWS Secrets Manager uses Apache HTTP Client (httpclient-4.5.7) under the covers. Is there a static way of hooking the Apache client with a custom Socket, SocketFactory, or SSLContext? One that does not require access to the HTTPClient object (which is not exposed either).

Answer 1

After much head banging I came up with the following code:
final String ciphers[] =
{ "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA", "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256",
"TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA", "TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA", "TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256",
"TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256" };
final String[] protocols = new String[]
{ "TLSv1.2" };
// create and initialize an SSLContext for a custom socket factory
final SSLContext sslcontext = SSLContext.getInstance("SSL");
sslcontext.init(null, null, new SecureRandom());
// and here's our SocketFactory
final SSLConnectionSocketFactory secureSocketFactory = new SSLConnectionSocketFactory(sslcontext, protocols,
ciphers, new DefaultHostnameVerifier());
// Create a custom AWS Client Configuration with our socket factory
final ClientConfiguration cc = new ClientConfiguration();
final ApacheHttpClientConfig acc = cc.getApacheHttpClientConfig();
acc.setSslSocketFactory(secureSocketFactory);
// Create a Secrets Manager client with our custom AWS Client Configuration
final AWSSecretsManager client = AWSSecretsManagerClientBuilder //
.standard() //
.withRegion(region) //
.withClientConfiguration(cc) //
.build();
client is then used for the requests.