How to solve "error:1408F10B:SSL routines:ssl3_get_record:wrong version number"?

Question

I am new to HTTPs. In our application to integrate with another system we were given HTTPs URLs along with their certificates. Our team added those certificates in the test store. Now when we are sending request on those URLs, we are getting “Unsupported or unrecognized SSL message”.

And if I do curl -v on that URL, I get error:1408F10B:SSL routines:ssl3_get_record:wrong version number. Is it problem on our side or this need to be fixed by other systems who shared those URLs with us.

Both of these errors are due to the same reason?

Answer 1

It is very likely that the server does not speak TLS at all.

The client will start with the TLS handshake and the server will reply to this with some non-TLS response. The client expect the server to do its part of the TLS handshake though. Thus it will try to interpret the servers as response as TLS. This will lead to strange error messages depending on the TLS stack used by the client.

With OpenSSL based stacks it will often result in wrong version number, since the trying to extract the TLS version number for the expected TLS record and get some unexpected results since the server did not actually send a TLS record.

Is it problem on our side or this need to be fixed by other systems who shared those URLs with us.

If this is exact the URL you are supposed to use (i.e. no simply changing of http:// to https:// on your site) then it is likely a server side problem. But it might also be a problem of some middlebox or software in the network path to the server, like some antivirus, firewall or captive portal hijacking your data and denying access to the remote system with an error message.

Answer 2

In my case, I had on apache2 another badly configured virtual host. On the other wrong virtual host there was a http virtual server on port 443!!!

The second virtual host was correct but apache cannot use different protocols on the same port for different virtual hosts.

After removing the http on port 443 configuration all other https hosts worked and error

error:1408F10B:SSL routines:ssl3_get_record:wrong version number"

disapeared