Introduction
It was a little bit hard task for me to integrate SSL in my Ionic 3 app using Cordova due to my lack of knowledge in SSL certificates. As usual i just landed in the HTTP native plugin section under ionic frameworks documentation section. It was not so helpful for me, because neither this page or its official github page not explaining how to generate the .cer file for SSL pinning, finally i found the solution by reading lots of Stackoverflow answers and other articles.
Procedure
Install the plugin as per the instruction on the documentation section
How to get the .cer file ?
I’m assuming that you need to make https requests to a single domain only
Method 1
It works only if you had chrome browser on a windows machine with no active antivirus software ( In my case kaspersky using a personal root certificate – that mask the actual SSL certificate keyfile from the user )
In this case, we can generate .cer file from your chrome browser on windows machine. Just access one of your public api url via chrome browser address bar and then click on the green padlock icon of your https url. then you can export the ssl public key as a .cer file
Watch this video to get clear understanding
Method 2 ( recommended one )
If you have a Linux or Mac machine or use you Linux server terminal – If your machine must have an installation of openssl.
Use the following linux command to obtain the .cer file
openssl s_client -showcerts -connect <domain name>:443 -servername <domain name>:443 </dev/null | sed -ne '/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p' > certificate.pem
Convert .pem file into .cer file
openssl x509 -inform PEM -in certificate.pem -outform DER -out certificate.cer
Download the certificate.cer file to your local machine and then include a copy on your ionic/cordova project root directory
You must call enableSSLPinning or setSSLCertMode method on your components.ts file based on the version of the installed plugin
That’s all!