TLS 1.2 and .NET Support: How to Avoid Connection Errors

I recently ran into an interesting issue when developing we are connecting to a third-party Carrier API. When trying to connect to the API endpoint, I received the following error message:

“An error occurred while making the HTTP request to https://<API endpoint>. This could be due to the fact that the server certificate is not configured properly with HTTP.SYS in the HTTPS case. This could also be caused by a mismatch of the security binding between the client and the server.” Inner exception was “Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.”

With data security in place lot of API providers are ending TLS 1.0 support. This can be overcomed by adding a line of code in .NET by setting TLS 1.1 or above
The default System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol in both .NET 4.0/4.5 is SecurityProtocolType.Tls|SecurityProtocolType.Ssl3.

.NET 4.0 supports up to TLS 1.0 while .NET 4.5 supports up to TLS 1.2

However, an application targeting .NET 4.0 can still support up to TLS 1.2 if .NET 4.5 is installed in the same environment. .NET 4.5 installs on top of .NET 4.0, replacing System.dll

Adding below one line of code will help you to avoid above error.

ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = (SecurityProtocolType)192 |
(SecurityProtocolType)768 | (SecurityProtocolType)3072;

Reference:

namespace System.Net
{
    [System.Flags]
    public enum SecurityProtocolType
    {
       Ssl3 = 48,
       Tls = 192,
       Tls11 = 768,
       Tls12 = 3072,
    }
}