Wednesday, April 20, 2016

What Do We Use for Android N Network Security Configuration for a Self-Signed Certificate?

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I am trying to test out all aspects of the network security configuration capability of the N Developer Preview. I have most of it working, but I am stumped by the self-signed certificate scenario.

According to the docs, Android N should be happy with a PEM or DER file, as it is for other certificate validation scenarios. However, I do not work with self-signed certificates much, and my attempts to get this working keep running into certificate path validation exceptions.

For testing, I am using thin as the server, running on my development machine, reachable by an N emulator. The self-signed certificate works for browsers on my development machine, and if I switch to running thin sans SSL, apps can reach the server just fine. So, it's not a connectivity issue.

I created the self-signed certificate using the instructions on this site:

sudo openssl genrsa -out "/etc/[webserver]/ssl/example.key" 2048 sudo openssl req -new -key "/etc/[webserver]/ssl/example.key" \                  -out "/etc/[webserver]/ssl/example.csr" sudo openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in "/etc/[webserver]/ssl/example.csr" \                   -signkey "/etc/[webserver]/ssl/example.key"  \                   -out "/etc/[webserver]/ssl/example.crt" 

According to this Stack Overflow answer, the example.crt file is a PEM file. Elsewhere, I see instructions for creating a "combined PEM" file. However, I tried both of these, with no luck.

In terms of the network security configuration stuff, I have tried both <domain-config> and <debug-overrides>. The latter looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  <network-security-config>   <debug-overrides>     <trust-anchors>       <certificates src="@raw/selfsigned"/>     </trust-anchors>   </debug-overrides> </network-security-config> 

But, I get the validation error in either case.

What exactly should we be putting in as a PEM or DER file, as a raw resource, that makes this work?

1 Answers

Answers 1

This appears to be working on N Developer Preview 2, using the example.crt generated by the openssl scripts shown in the question. For the moment, I am going to assume that there was a change in N Developer Preview 2 compared to N Developer Preview 1 that accounts for the change.

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