Solving “Received fatal alert: handshake_failure” error when performing HTTPS connections on a custom made JRE with jlink

TL; Tell me already what to do:
Add the jdk.crypto.cryptoki module to the list of --add-modules parameter to your jlink command invocation

If you’re reading this you’re one of the few developers out there that wanted to distribute a java 9+ app (using either jdk 9, jdk 10, jdk 11 or jdk 12, as of this writing) with a smaller version of the jdk, to build your custom jre, you used the jlink tool.

When you run your app using the full JRE that comes with the OpenJDK, your app is working fine when it comes to making https requests, but when you run your app using your custom jre you get the following error when opening https connections

Received fatal alert: handshake_failure

This issue occurs because your JRE is missing lots of Cipher Suites that come with the full JDK.

With your JDK, you can try to check the list of supported ciphers with this one liner using the jrunscript tool:

jrunscript -e "print(java.util.Arrays.toString(javax.net.ssl.SSLServerSocketFactory.getDefault().getSupportedCipherSuites()))"

however that might not work for your custom JRE if you haven’t included the scripting module, so here’s a Java program I made that prints all the available Ciphers of your JRE

public class PrintCiphers {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
	var sslSocketFactory = javax.net.ssl.SSLServerSocketFactory.getDefault();
	System.out.println("SSLServerSocketFactory -> " + sslSocketFactory.getClass().getName());
	try {
  	    var getSupportedCipherSuitesMethod = sslSocketFactory.getClass().getMethod("getSupportedCipherSuites");
	    String[] ciphers = (String[]) getSupportedCipherSuitesMethod.invoke(sslSocketFactory);
	    int i=1;
            for (String c : ciphers) {
		System.out.println(i++ + " " + c);
	    }
	} catch(Throwable t) {
	    t.printStackTrace();
	}
    }
}

If you run PrintCiphers on your OpenJDK’s full JRE, you will see almost 50 Cipher Suites available:

$ java PrintCiphers;
1 TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
2 TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
3 TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256
4 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
5 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
6 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256
7 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
8 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256
9 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
10 TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
11 TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
12 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
13 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256
14 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
15 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
16 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
17 TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
18 TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
19 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
20 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
21 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384
22 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384
23 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256
24 TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384
25 TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384
26 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256
27 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256
28 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
29 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
30 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
31 TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
32 TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
33 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
34 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
35 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
36 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
37 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
38 TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
39 TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
40 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
41 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
42 TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
43 TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
44 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
45 TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
46 TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
47 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
48 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
49 TLS_EMPTY_RENEGOTIATION_INFO_SCSV

but if you use your custom JRE to run PrintCiphers you will see only 23 Cipher Suites available:

$ jre/bin/java PrintCiphers
1 TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
2 TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
3 TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256
4 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
5 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
6 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256
7 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
8 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
9 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
10 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
11 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256
12 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256
13 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256
14 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
15 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
16 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
17 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
18 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
19 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
20 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
21 TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
22 TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
23 TLS_EMPTY_RENEGOTIATION_INFO_SCSV

To solve the problem you must add the jdk.crypto.cryptoki module to the list of --add-modules parameter to your jlink command invocation, next time your run PrintCiphers you should see the full list of Cipher Suites and your SSL handshake issues should be gone.

Introducing Yuca: A light-weight, in-memory, fast and simple to use search engine library.

https://github.com/gubatron/yuca

If your app can’t handle or doesn’t really need installing a full featured and heavy search engine like Lucene, nor you want to depend on a SQL database for indexing and doing simple search based strings you can use Yuca to index documents under any number of arbitrary keys which can be grouped under tags.

The shared library currently weighs ~170kb without any packing optimizations, we hope to reduce the size further in the near future.

Today, Wed May 9th the library is only available as a C++ shared or static library, the goal is to have bindings for popular programming languages, the first being Java since I need to use it on Android apps I’m developing.

If you feel like you need something like this and you’re not coding in C++, please create an issue on the github repository asking for the language bindings that you need and I’ll try to prioritize your request for the next set of language bindings.

How to run your Kotlin gradle built app from the command line

So you build your Kotlin app, you went through the trouble of creating a build.gradle script that you build with

gradle assemble

this outputs a a “build/libs/kotlin.jar” .jar file, but you have no clue how to run your Kotlin code from the command line.

Doing it by hand with “java -cp ” is too much work, and there is a way to do

gradle run

or even

gradle -b /home/myuser/mykotlinapp/build.gradle run

in case you need to run your Kotlin script from a cronjob.

Make sure you have the following inside your build.gradle script in order to make the “run” task available


apply plugin: 'application'

// DO notice the "Kt" suffix on the class name below, if you don't use the Kt generated class you will get errors
mainClassName = 'com.myapp.MyKotlinAppKt'

// optional: add one string per argument you want as the default JVM args
applicationDefaultJvmArgs = ["-Xms512m", "-Xmx1g"]

What if I don’t want to use gradle, and just java

ok… ok…
java -cp $KOTLIN_LIB/kotlin-runtime.jar:build/libs/kotlin.jar: com.myapp.MyKotlinAppKt

Fix high CPU usage by WordPress and MySQL

Today one of our wordpress sites had very high server load and it was being caused by MySQL

So I went to the mysql console, and looked up the process list:

So this guy is appearing a lot
SELECT option_name, option_value FROM wp_options WHERE autoload = 'yes';

Let’s see how it’s behaving with explain
explain SELECT option_name, option_value FROM wp_options WHERE autoload = 'yes';

It’s scanning 226k rows to get its search results!

Probably some moronic plugin is doing this and wordpress does not add an index on that table. The solution is simple, let’s add an index!

ALTER TABLE wp_options ADD INDEX (`autoload`);

Now let’s run explain again

From scanning 226k it went down to 408!, 3 orders of magnitude drop.

And now the CPU load went below 4%, crisis averted.

[Monero-Development] Installing dependencies on Mac

March 12th 2017.

In order to build Monero on MacOSX with cmake, I had to install the following dependencies via homebrew

brew install libunwind-headers --force
brew link libunwind-headers --force
brew install miniupnpc
brew install ldns
brew link ldns --force
brew install expat
brew link expat --force
brew install doxygen

[CODE] Detecting if a VPN connection is active programmatically (Jan/2017)

This method of programatic detection works as of January 24, 2017 with the latest versions of Express VPN and PIA (Private Internet Access)

On Mac OSX/
This works for Mac OSX 10.2.2.

The trick is to request your ip routing table and examine through which network interface your default traffic is going through.
(To do this programmatically you will have to parse the output with your favorite programming language)

This is how it looks for both ExpressVPN and PIA when the VPN is active:

To request your routing table you can do this on the command line:
netstat -nr

Notice the line starting with “0/1”, it’s going through that tunnel interface. (In Linux it would show 0.0.0.0 instead of 0/1)

VPN ON output in Mac

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags        Refs      Use   Netif Expire
0/1                10.81.10.5         UGSc            5        0   utun1
...

VPN ON output in Linux

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
0.0.0.0         10.31.10.5      128.0.0.0       UG        0 0          0 tun0
...

When you turn VPN off this is how it looks:

VPN OFF in Mac

Destination        Gateway            Flags        Refs      Use   Netif Expire
default            192.168.1.1        UGSc           66        0     en0
127                127.0.0.1          UCS             2        4     lo0

VPN OFF in Linux

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
0.0.0.0         172.16.245.2    0.0.0.0         UG        0 0          0 eth0

So a quick way to determine if the VPN is on or off in Mac or Linux, is to filter-out what you care for using grep.
If you have any output it’s on, if not it’s off

netstat -nr | egrep "^0" | grep "tun"

(we filter for “tun” and not utun1, as in linux vpn network interfaces start with “tun”)

Parse the output of that command and you will have your VPN status. No output means VPN is disconnected. Some output means the VPN is connected.

On Windows
Do a nestat -nr and look for 128.0.0.1, if you find it, VPN is on.