An error occurred in the secure channel support - Classic ASP HTTP Request

Question

I have a classic ASP website running on a Windows Server 2012 box. One page makes a HTTP request to another application over https using code like this:

Answer 1

We had a variation on this issues and it really cost us some time to figure it out.
Here is the situation: An older Linux server hosting an application written in PHP and provides data through webservice calls. The server is using HTTPS. Calls from various clients are made with code using the winHTTP 5.2 library. (Winhttp.dll)

Symptom: Our clients are now getting sporadic error messages when making repeated winHTTP calls using a ‘POST’ command. The messages are either ‘The buffers supplied to a function was to small.‘ or ‘An error occurred in the secure channel support ‘. After much searching we discovered that the client’s server was logging ‘Schannel Event ID 36887 alert code 20’ in the Event Viewer that corresponded with the visible error message.

Solution: We discovered that our old Linux server could not support TLS 1.2. (CentOS 5.11) We also learned that several of our clients had recently (summer 2016) applied an update to their Microsoft servers. (Server 2008, server 2012) The fix was to force their servers to use TLS 1.1 for the webservice calls. The part that is rather strange to me is that the settings in Internet Explorer for changing the TLS had no effect on the problem. However by changing a setting in Group Policies we were able to solve the problem. Our technical advisor on this matter pointed out that the change is really obscure, but that a third-party vendor has provided a quick solution. That tool is called IIS Crypto from Nartac. https://www.nartac.com/Products/IISCrypto/Download The tool lets you specifically select Protocols. We are now getting a new server to host our applications (CentOS 6) and then should be able to use the TLS 1.2 protocol!