Forcing an old .NET application to support TLS 1.2 without recompiling it

Development

As most servers are moving toward TLS 1.3 and removing TLS 1.0/1.1 support, examples of legacy .NET applications – compiled with an old version of the .NET Framework, like 4.0 or 4.5 – experiencing connectivity issues with TLS 1.2 servers are becoming more and more common, specially since installing a more recent version of the .NET Framework is not sufficient: it's the version used for compiling your project that actually matters when it comes to selecting the supported TLS versions during the TLS handshake.

To make migration a bit less painful, Microsoft published a "transport security best practices" paper that list a few solutions that help avoid handshake errors related to the use of legacy TLS versions that are no longer considered safe.

One of the proposed solutions is to update your project to target .NET Framework 4.7: in this case, you'll have nothing else to do, as .NET 4.7 applications automatically default to whatever the operating system they run on offers and considers safe (which currently includes TLS 1.2 and will later include TLS 1.3).

Unfortunately, such an option requires re-compiling the application, which is not always feasible. Thankfully, you can also force an existing application to use the system default TLS versions without having to re-compile it (assuming it doesn't explicitly set the SSL/TLS versions it prefers via ServicePointManager).

The best practices paper lists a few options, but my favourite one is the one that consists in simply updating the configuration file associated with the application executable, as it's easy to do and doesn't impact anything else on the machine.

For that, locate the configuration file associated to the executable of the application you want to add TLS 1.2 support to: it's always named [name of the executable].exe.config. If there's no such file, create one. Once located or created, update its content to enable the compatibility switch required to support TLS 1.2:

1
2
3
4
5
6
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <runtime>
    <AppContextSwitchOverrides value="Switch.System.Net.DontEnableSystemDefaultTlsVersions=false"/>
  </runtime>
</configuration>

If you're still using Windows 7, you'll also have to tweak the registry to enable TLS 1.2 support, as indicated on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/tls/tls-registry-settings.