SSL Exception on Java: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors

java amazon-web-services ssl amazon-rds mysql-connector
Michel Feinstein picture Michel Feinstein · Jan 16, 2018 · Viewed 16.6k times · Source

I am trying to establish a SSL connection with my MySQL database in Java using MySQL Connector/J (version 5.1.45) and this AWS RDS certificate here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/rds-downloads/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem

But I am getting the following Exception:

java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors

I could trace this Exception down to the MySQL Connector/J class ExportControlled.java on line 297:

CertPathValidatorResult result = this.validator.validate(certPath, this.validatorParams);

Then I can't go further down since this goes into the JRE security classes, like CertPathValidator.

Since I am using MySQL Connector/J to do the whole SSL magic, my hands are tied and I don't know what's going on or how to fix this. The certificate works fine on MySQL Workbench and on Intelli J IDEA Database, so I have no clue why it's being rejected now.

How do I fix this?

Answer

Michel Feinstein picture Michel Feinstein · Jan 17, 2018

I fixed this after A LOT of headaches. The truststore needs to have ALL the certificates of the chain, I was using https://s3.amazonaws.com/rds-downloads/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem, which IN THEORY has all the certificates, but when you import it to a keystore file, keytool ignores all but the first certificate, so I only had the root certificate on my keystore and not the root and the AWS Region certificate that I actually needed.

For now, there's no way to bach import all the certificates, I tried several methods, including converting to PKCS7 (which supports certificates chains), but keytool needs one alias for each certificate so you need to import each certificate and give it an alias, one at the time.

You could make a program to call keytool and load one certificate at a time or you could be a bit more lazy as I was and use KeyStore Explorer. You will need to select to create a new keystore file and open the bundled pem certificate using the Examine File option and for each certificate on it, select import, this will import the selected certificate to the new keystore. At the end you just have to define a password for your keystore file and save it.

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