The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel

Question

We are unable to connect to an HTTPS server using WebRequest because of this error message:

The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secur

Answer 1

"The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel" exception can occur if the server is returning an HTTP 401 Unauthorized response to the HTTP request.

You can determine if this is happening by turning on trace-level System.Net logging for your client application, as described in this answer.

Once that logging configuration is in place, run the application and reproduce the error, then look in the logging output for a line like this:

System.Net Information: 0 : [9840] Connection#62912200 - Received status line: Version=1.1, StatusCode=401, StatusDescription=Unauthorized.

In my situation, I was failing to set a particular cookie that the server was expecting, leading to the server responding to the request with the 401 error, which in turn led to the "Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel" exception.