Question

Here is my code, it took me forever to write being I’m still a nube:

Imports System.Net
Imports System.Text
Imports System.IO

Public Class Form1

Dim logincookie As CookieContainer

Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As System.Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles      Button1.Click

    Dim postdata As String = "action=do_login&url=https%3A%2F%2Fforum.suprbay.org% 2F&quick_login=1&quick_username=USERNAME&quick_password=PASSWORD&submit=Login&quick_remember=yes"
    Dim tempcookies As New CookieContainer
    Dim encoding As New UTF8Encoding
    Dim bytedata As Byte() = encoding.GetBytes(postdata)
    Dim postreq As HttpWebRequest = DirectCast(WebRequest.Create("https://forum.suprbay.org/member.php"), HttpWebRequest)

    postreq.Method = "POST"
    postreq.KeepAlive = True
    postreq.CookieContainer = tempcookies
    postreq.ContentType = "application/x-www-forum-urlencoded"
    postreq.Referer = "https://forum.suprbay.org/member.php"
    postreq.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101  Firefox/9.0.1"
    postreq.ContentLength = bytedata.Length

    Dim postreqstream As Stream = postreq.GetRequestStream()
    postreqstream.Write(bytedata, 0, bytedata.Length)
    postreqstream.Close()
    Dim postresponse As HttpWebResponse
    postresponse = DirectCast(postreq.GetResponse(), HttpWebResponse)

    tempcookies.Add(postresponse.Cookies)
    logincookie = tempcookies

    Dim postreqreader As New StreamReader(postresponse.GetResponseStream)
    Dim thepage As String = postreqreader.ReadToEnd

    RichTextBox1.Text = thepage

    End Sub

End Class

When I run it and click the button, I get the following error:

“The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust
relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.”

It is the official forum of PirateBay.Se which is a torrent website, and if you go to it in a regular browser you get the warning about the trust certificate, so that is probably why I’m getting the error, right? How can I ignore the trust certificates and stuff so my application can work?

Answer 1

This line should ignore the trust errors on the connection, do this before you try to connect:

ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback = AddressOf ValidateRemoteCertificate

You will need to have this defined in your class as well:

   Public Shared Function ValidateRemoteCertificate(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal certificate As X509Certificate, ByVal chain As X509Chain, ByVal sslPolicyErrors As SslPolicyErrors) As Boolean
        Return True
    End Function

Sorry if this is not a perfect translation to VB.Net, i had this in C# originally.

EDIT:

And yes, that is exactly why you are getting this error, the cert they have is expired.