SecureBlackbox 2020 Node.js Edition

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Common Errors

This page covers the most popular errors stepped on by our customers and relevant approaches to their resolution.

TLS certificate validation failed: error 75788; the connection will be terminated

This error can be returned by any component involved in TLS activity - either directly (like Httpclient) or indirectly (like Pdfsigner, which may use TLS when connecting to a timestamping service). It indicates that the TLS certificate presented by the server didn't pass the chain validation procedure.

One of the most common reasons for the TLS certificate to fail validation is that its chain doesn't lead to a trust anchor - a root or CA certificate explicitly trusted in the system. This may happen for a variety of reasons, with the most popular being outdated or missing list of trusted certificates in the system. For example, ageing Windows XP or Windows Mobile systems are unlikely to have trust anchors capable of validating modern web site certificates.

This is also the default case on Linux which, unlike Windows or Mac OS, does not have a concept of system-wide trusted certificates. This means that on Linux you must supply the list of trusted certificates to the component manually to make TLS connection work.

Finally, your company's internal test or file servers are unlikely to have their certificates trusted in the system. You might want to "pin" them to your component to connect to them smoothly.

See the Validating TLS Certificates article for more details about validating certificates in TLS components.

'Invalid Certificate Data', 'Invalid size', or 'Invalid file format (possibly not a PEM?)' exceptions when loading a certificate in Delphi application

Sometimes, when running your application from Delphi IDE, you may observe one or more of those exceptions. In most cases they do not indicate that anything is going wrong and do not affect the flow of your application. Your certificate is most likely well-formed and good for use.

These exceptions are thrown, and caught, by SBB itself, internally, to facilitate and control certificate processing. You can only notice them when running your application under a Delphi debugger, but not when running it standalone outside of it.

The next time when one of these exceptions stops the execution of your program, tick the 'Ignore this exception type' checkbox on the exception dialog before clicking 'Continue'. This will tell the debugger to never stop on it again. Note that as certificate processing may throw several different exceptions, you might need to repeat this procedure for every such exception: EElCertificateError, EElASN1ReadError etc. There are only a few of them (4 or 5) but once you've done this procedure for all or them you will no longer see them.

SecureBlackbox-powered Delphi application crashes on startup. A 0xC000007B or 0x0EEDFADE error is sometimes returned.

This error affects the standard variant of Delphi Edition (not the Backwards Compatibility Pack), and is a symptom of DEP kicking in. It may happen on some target systems but not on others.

More systems are gradually enforcing DEP these days, which, unfortunately, may clash with the way SecureBlackbox packages its functionality by default.

One guaranteed way to avoid this problem is to switch to the external DLL deployment mode when distributing your SecureBlackbox-driven application. You can do that by defining a USESECUREBLACKBOXDLL conditional globally when compiling your project (USESECUREBLACKBOXLITEDLL if using SecureBlackbox Lite), and including secureblackbox20.dll (secureblackboxlite20.dll) in your deployment package.

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SecureBlackbox 2020 Node.js Edition - Version 20.0 [Build 8165]