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 root of this exception in my case was that at some point in code the following was being called:

ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Ssl3;

This is really bad. Not only is it instructing .NET to use an insecure protocol, but this impacts every new WebClient (and similar) request made afterward within your appdomain. (Note that incoming web requests are unaffected in your ASP.NET app, but new WebClient requests, such as to talk to an external web service, are).

In my case, it was not actually needed, so I could just delete the statement and all my other web requests started working fine again. Based on my reading elsewhere, I learned a few things:

• This is a global setting in your appdomain, and if you have concurrent activity, you can't reliably set it to one value, do your action, and then set it back. Another action may take place during that small window and be impacted.
• The correct setting is to leave it default. This allows .NET to continue to use whatever is the most secure default value as time goes on and you upgrade frameworks. Setting it to TLS12 (which is the most secure as of this writing) will work now but in 5 years may start causing mysterious problems.
• If you really need to set a value, you should consider doing it in a separate specialized application or appdomain and find a way to talk between it and your main pool. Because it's a single global value, trying to manage it within a busy app pool will only lead to trouble. This answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26754917/7656 provides a possible solution by way of a custom proxy. (Note I have not personally implemented it.)