handshake_failure trying to access file on same server - ssl

Question

My code is trying to access a template file on the same server as the application.
It all worked fine until we switched on SSL.
Now when connecting to the file I get a SSLHandshakeException: handshake_failure with not much information on the actual cause of the issue.
If I try to access the file through the browser I get a warning page asking if I want to proceed at my own risk.
Is it a problem with the certificate? Can I bypass it?
Edit: The server is JBoss EAP 6.1 with Java 1.7. It's configured to use TLS1.2.
The bit retrieving the template is:
URL url;
URLConnection urlConnection;
try {
url = new URL(templateUrl);
urlConnection = url.openConnection();
urlConnection.setConnectTimeout(connectionTimeout);
urlConnection.setReadTimeout(connectionTimeout);
BufferedReader breader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(urlConnection.getInputStream()));
String line;
while ((line = breader.readLine()) != null) {
strHtmlContent.append(line);
}
}

Answer 1

Handshake error is usually not a problem with the certificate, at least not with the validation of the certificate. It can have several other reasons, typically wrong protocol version, no cipher overlap, missing use of SNI... .
Unfortunately it is impossible to say what the problem is in your specific case but you might narrow it down by trying to access the site with different clients (i.e. browser, curl, ...). If not even a browser can access the site it is probably a misconfiguration of the server.