Custom SSL handling stopped working on Android 2.2 FroYo

Question

For my app, Transdroid, I am connecting to remote servers via HTTP and optionally securely via HTTPS. For these HTTPS connections with the HttpClient I am using a custom SSL socket factory implementation to make sure self-signed certificates are working. Basically, I accept everything and ignore every checking of any certificate.

This has been working fine for some time now, but it no longer work for Android 2.2 FroYo. When trying to connect, it will return an exception:

java.io.IOException: SSL handshake failure: I/O error during system call, Broken pipe

Here is how I initialize the HttpClient:

    SchemeRegistry registry = new SchemeRegistry();
    registry.register(new Scheme("http", new PlainSocketFactory(), 80));
    registry.register(new Scheme("https", (trustAll ? new FakeSocketFactory() : SSLSocketFactory.getSocketFactory()), 443));
    client = new DefaultHttpClient(new ThreadSafeClientConnManager(httpParams, registry), httpParams);

I make use of a FakeSocketFactory and FakeTrustManager, of which the source can be found here.

Again, I don't understand why it suddenly stopped work, or even what the error 'Broken pipe' means. I have seen messages on Twitter that Seesmic and Twidroid fail with SSL enabled on FroYo as well, but am unsure if it's related.

Thanks for any directions/help!

Urbain

Answer 1

Here is the answer, with many, many thanks to a helpful Seesmic developer willing to share the fix:

In the custom socket factory, the socket creation (with createSocket) has apparently been changed specifically for the SSLSocketFactory implementation. So the old:

    @Override
    public Socket createSocket(Socket socket, String host, int port, boolean autoClose)
                    throws IOException, UnknownHostException {
            return getSSLContext().getSocketFactory().createSocket();
    }

Needs to be changed to:

    @Override
    public Socket createSocket(Socket socket, String host, int port, boolean autoClose)
                    throws IOException, UnknownHostException {
            return getSSLContext().getSocketFactory().createSocket(socket, host, port, autoClose);
    }

And then it worked again for me!

UPDATE: As this is still a popular answer, let me update my link to working code. This SSl-enabled socket factory that support modern protocols (TLS 1.1+), SNI and optionally allows to accept all certificates (insecure, ignores all SSL certificates) or a self-signed certificates (by SHA-1 hash).

Urbain

I was having the same problem. Thank you very much for this quick and easy solution. – Pains

This fix didn't solve the problem for me by itself - I found I had to also increase the priority of the thread in which the socket connection was being established to THREAD_PRIORITY_URGENT_AUDIO (followed by setting the priority back to THREAD_PRIORITY_MORE_FAVORABLE once the connection had been established). In this specific case I suspect an animation was using too much CPU :-( – Boylston

i still have the SSL handshake failure: I/O error during system call, Unknown error:0 – Diaphoretic

How to call the above function in an activity? – Snuggery

Answer 2

More Info on this problem http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=10472 This fixed the SSL issue we had for HTC Desire when we updated to Android 2.2

Morrell

Specifically, look at comment #17: code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=10807#c17. This helped me greatly while getting an android app ready. – Dispel