HandshakeException CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED: Application Verification Failure

[kirstenkoa]

Hello, thanks for taking the time to read my question!

My application is very intermittently (maybe 1% probability) hitting this error when trying to call our backend's REST APIs.

HandshakeException CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED: application verification failure(handshake.cc:391)

I saw some suggestions to explicitly have the client trust the server as a potential fix for this issue. For example, #963 (comment)

We are going to try to apply that change, but I would like to understand if this could even be the root cause for our specific case. I have limited knowledge of how this works, but my intuition makes me think if it a cert/trust issue, the requests would be failing all the time vs. just <1% of the time.

I would appreciate any pointers to what else could be the issue. 😅

Thank you again!

Edit: it seems like only iOS users have experienced this. Android hasn't hit this issue at all.

[brianquinlan]

I have no idea how you could be experiencing this failure transiently. Maybe you could use Wireshark to capture traffic until you encounter the issue and post the message exchange?

[kirstenkoa]

Hey @brianquinlan, thanks for the response! Unfortunately, no one on the team has experienced this issue personally. It was experienced by some testers. Our main suspect network issue since they were in places with low network connectivity.

I posted here because HandshakeException isn't really something we would expect to see for a network issue, so I was wondering if there was something else we were missing.