How can I know if the request to the servlet was executed using HTTP or HTTPS?

Question

I wrote a servlet in Java and I would like to know if the request to that servlet was executed using HTTP or HTTPS.

I thought I can use request.getProtocol() but it returns HTTP/1.1 on both methods.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

HttpSerlvetRequest.isSecure() is the answer. The ServletContainer is responsible for returning true in the following cases:

• If the ServletContainer can itself accept requests on https.
• If there is a LoadBalancer in front of ServletContainer. And , the LoadBlancer has got the request on https and has dispatched the same to the ServletContainer on plain http. In this case, the LoadBalancer sends X-SSL-Secure : true header to the ServletContainer, which should be honored.

The Container should also make this request attributes available when the request is received on https:

• javax.servlet.http.sslsessionid
• javax.servlet.request.key_size
• javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate

Answer 2

You can't reliably depend on port numbers.
But you can depend on the scheme:

Use: request.getScheme() to see if it is https.

If it is then it is secure connection.

I believe this should work regardless of Tomcat version