How to work with client certificates on Jetty SPDY

Question

I have problem with client certifiacates when I use SPDY with Jetty.

It works when I work with NPN and start Jetty SPDY server with:

SSLconnector = new HTTPSPDYServerConnector(server, sslContextFactory);

As a baseRequest.getHttpChannel() it uses org.eclipse.jetty.spdy.server.http.HttpChannelOverSPDY and I can read SSL properties like SSL_SESSION_ID and client certificates with code like:

// ... HttpServletRequest request
java.security.cert.X509Certificate client_certs[] = (java.security.cert.X509Certificate[])request.getAttribute("javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate");

But NPN is not an option in Java8 (see my question How to run Jetty with SPDY using ALPN?). In Java8 I have to use ALPN protocol like:

sslContextFactory.setWantClientAuth(w3srv_config.want_client_auth);
// ...
HttpConfiguration httpConfig = new HttpConfiguration();

SslConnectionFactory ssl = new SslConnectionFactory(sslContextFactory, "alpn");
ALPNServerConnectionFactory alpn = new ALPNServerConnectionFactory("spdy/3", "http/1.1");
alpn.setDefaultProtocol("http/1.1");
HTTPSPDYServerConnectionFactory spdy = new HTTPSPDYServerConnectionFactory(SPDY.V3, httpConfig);
HttpConnectionFactory http = new HttpConnectionFactory(httpConfig);

SSLconnector = new ServerConnector(server, new ConnectionFactory[]{ssl, alpn, spdy, http});
//...

With this code I got null when I want to get any SSL related javax.servlet.request.*. Its baseRequest.getHttpChannel() is org.eclipse.jetty.server.HttpConnection$HttpChannelOverHttp.

What I have to change to work with client certificates?

Answer 1

The javax.servlet.request.* properties you are looking for are set by Jetty's SecureRequestCustomizer, which you need to add to the httpConfig object you create in your code example above.

I am guessing that your NPN configuration is slightly different, or you use some utility method in Jetty that does this for you with NPN but not with ALPN.

Just doing:

HttpConfiguration httpConfig = new HttpConfiguration();
httpConfig.addCustomizer(new SecureRequestCustomizer());

should be enough to fix your issue.