403 Forbibben in API Rest Call

Question

I am writing a small program in java which makes a rest call to an endpoint to verify a reference id. I have written this program in two different ways and each work when I run it from my PC but when I deploy the jar file on the test Linux CentOs Server, I get a 403 forbidden error from the end point, So I thought maybe the ip was blocked and then I tried the same thing with curl and it worked perfectly.

What could be the issue? could it be ssl certificate version error?

Way 1 :

public String sendGet(String id) {
    restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
    log.info("Authorization :::: {}", "Bearer " + this.getApiAuth());

    HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();

    headers.set("Authorization", "Bearer " + this.getApiAuth());

    List<MediaType> acceptableMediaTypes = new ArrayList<>();

    acceptableMediaTypes.add(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);
    headers.setAccept(acceptableMediaTypes);
    headers.setContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);

    HttpEntity<String> httpRequestEntity = new HttpEntity<>(headers);
    ResponseEntity<String> exchange = getRestTemplate().exchange(this.getUrl() + id, HttpMethod.GET, httpRequestEntity, String.class);

    log.info("Status Code :::: {}", exchange.getStatusCode());
    log.info("Status Code :::: {}", exchange.getBody());
    return exchange.getBody(); 
}

Way 2 :

 public String sendGet(String message) throws Exception {
    infoLogger.info("GOING HERE " + url + message);

    java.lang.System.setProperty("https.protocols", "TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2");
    URL obj = new URL(url + message);
    HttpsURLConnection con = (HttpsURLConnection) obj.openConnection();

    con.setRequestMethod("GET");

    infoLogger.info("Setting Authorization: Bearer " + this.getApiAuth());
    con.setRequestProperty("Authorization", "Bearer " +this.getApiAuth());
    con.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE);
    con.setRequestProperty("accept", MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE);

    int responseCode = con.getResponseCode();
    infoLogger.info("\nSending 'GET' request to URL : " + url);
    infoLogger.info("Response Code : " + responseCode);

    BufferedReader in = null;
    String inputLine;
    StringBuilder response = new StringBuilder();

    if ((200 <= con.getResponseCode()) && (con.getResponseCode() <= 299)) {
        if (con.getInputStream() != null) {
            in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getInputStream()));
        }
    } else if (con.getErrorStream() != null) {
        in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getErrorStream()));
    } else {
        infoLogger.info("GOT NOTHING ");
    }

    while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
        response.append(inputLine);
    }
    in.close();

    //print result
    System.out.println(response.toString());
    return response.toString();

}

So I did a .getResponseMessage as asked and I got the following error:

Access denied | api.paystack.co used Cloudflare to restrict accessbody{margin:0;padding:0} Please enable cookies.

Error 1010 Ray ID: 49f12b9b9bb6c5fa • 2019-01-26 07:12:17 UTC

Access denied What happened?

The owner of this website (api.paystack.co) has banned your access based on your browser's signature (49f12b9b9bb6c5fa-ua21).

Cloudflare Ray ID: 49f12b9b9bb6c5fa • Your IP: 104.248.9.123 • Performance & security by Cloudflare

window._cf_translation = {}; `

Answer 1

The supplyer of the service you are trying to access is using CloudFlare. They are using some sort of browser integrity check (see https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200171806-Error-1010-The-owner-of-this-website-has-banned-your-access-based-on-your-browser-s-signature).

You can change the signature in your java code:

con.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "My own REST client");

You seem to use a different JDK on your PC than on your CentOS server, so the signatures of the Java HttpsURLConnection are different. They are of course different from curl.

Answer 2

For Way 1, this will work:

headers.add("user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.99 Safari/537.36");