I'm receiving the following error: Could not acquire security credentials: error 0x80090331, what can I do?

Article ID: 336
Category: Collector Service
Applies to: 3.2 or newer
Updated: 2021-10-18

I'm receiving the following error from the collector:

Event ID: 905
Source: EventSentry
Category: Collector Client

The EventSentry agent is unable to establish a secure connection with any of the listed collectors:
servername.domain.local@5001: Could not acquire security credentials: error 0x80090331. (273)

You will receive this error message if your "SCHANNEL > PROTOCOLS" registry settings are configured incorrectly. Open 'Regedit' and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols

There will more than likely be multiple protocols listed, and if you expand each protocol (e.g., TLS 1.0), then you will see both a CLIENT and SERVER subkey. If your SSL/TLS configuration is incorrect, then you will see the following registry values in both the CLIENT and SERVER subkeys:

DisabledByDefault=1 (REG_DWORD)
Enabled=0 (REG_DWORD)

Here is an example:

For TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2, the CLIENT subkey should only have DisabledByDefault set to 0, and the SERVER subkey should only have Enabled with a value of 1.

To delete the corrupt values, open an elevated command prompt and run the following command:

reg delete HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols

Then, you can download and import the .reg file included in the link below which will enable all the TLS protocols while leaving SSL 2.0 / SSL 3.0 disabled.