Set user-agent property in https connection header

Question

I am unable to properly set the user-agent property for an https connection. From what I\'ve gathered, http-header properties can be set through either the

Answer 1

I've found/verified the problem by inspecting http communictions using WireShark. Is there any way around this?

There is no problem here. The User-Agent header is set whether the request is transported via HTTP / HTTPS. Even setting it to something unreasonable like blah blah works on HTTPS. The headers shown below were captured when the underlying protocol used was HTTPS.

Request headers sent via HTTPS

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive

---

User-Agent: blah blah
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive

---

Here's the code that triggers the request.

        // localhost:52999 is a reverse proxy to xxx:443
        java.net.URL url = new java.net.URL( "https://localhost:52999/" );
        java.net.URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
        conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent","Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0");
        conn.connect();
        java.io.BufferedReader serverResponse = new java.io.BufferedReader(new java.io.InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
        System.out.println(serverResponse.readLine());
        serverResponse.close();

Normally, HTTPS requests cannot be sniffed (like @Perception mentioned). Piping the request through a proxy that replaces the root CA with its own fake CA will allow you to see the traffic. A simpler method is to just look at the access log of the target server. But as you can see from the HTTPS request snippet above, the User-Agent header that is sent is correct.