How to resolve java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors error in axis2?

I was getting this error (see below) in one of our axis2 based web service, and this is what I did to resolve it.

org.apache.axis2.AxisFault: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path validation failed: java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors
at org.apache.axis2.AxisFault.makeFault(AxisFault.java:430)
at org.apache.axis2.transport.http.SOAPMessageFormatter.writeTo(SOAPMessageFormatter.java:83)
…
Caused by: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxIOException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path validation failed: java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors
at com.ctc.wstx.sw.BaseStreamWriter.flush(BaseStreamWriter.java:313)
at org.apache.axiom.om.impl.MTOMXMLStreamWriter.flush(MTOMXMLStreamWriter.java:146)
…
Caused by: javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path validation failed: java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors
at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:150)
…
Caused by: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path validation failed: java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors
at sun.security.validator.PKIXValidator.doValidate(PKIXValidator.java:187)
…
Caused by: java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors
at sun.security.provider.certpath.PKIXCertPathValidator.engineValidate(PKIXCertPathValidator.java:195)
at java.security.cert.CertPathValidator.validate(CertPathValidator.java:206)
at sun.security.validator.PKIXValidator.doValidate(PKIXValidator.java:182)
… 49 more

Solution
Axis2 uses commons-httpclient library (now, a part of Apache HttpComponents™ project) for making http/https connections. I’m doing a little tweak for it accept any server certificate like this:
(By the way, I didn’t bother at all about whether the certificate was valid, self-signed, or has a valid trust chain)

Stub stub = ;
. . .
//Line #1
org.apache.commons.httpclient.protocol.Protocol.unregisterProtocol("https");

//Line #2
org.apache.commons.httpclient.protocol.Protocol.registerProtocol
   ("https", new Protocol("https", (ProtocolSocketFactory) new
   org.apache.commons.httpclient.contrib.ssl.EasySSLProtocolSocketFactory(), 13087));

Line #1: Unregistered the default socket factory for the https URI protocol scheme
Line #2: Used a custom socket factory – EasySSLProtocolSocketFactory – used to create SSL connections that allow the target server to authenticate with a self-signed certificate (to put it simple, it accepts any self-signed certificate). Remember, this socket factory SHOULD NOT be used for productive systems due to security reasons, unless it is a concious decision and you are perfectly aware of security implications of accepting self-signed certificates

To use this custom socket factory, you need to include not-yet-commons-ssl-0.3.9.jar in classpath and it’s available here (as of writing this post): http://repository.jboss.org/maven2/org/apache/commons/not-yet-commons-ssl/0.3.9/. if you don’t find here, you can google and get it.

About the commons-httpclient, it provides full support for HTTP over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or IETF Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols by leveraging the  Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE). JSSE has been integrated into the Java 2 platform as of version 1.4 and works with HttpClient out of the box.

Tags: Axis2, HTTP Secure, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Java, Java Secure Socket Extension, Protocols, Public key certificate, SSL-TLS, Transport Layer Security