Tomcat Server/Client Self-Signed SSL Certificate

Question

I have an Apache Tomcat 6.x server running with a self-signed SSL certificate. I want the client to present their own certificate to the server so I can authenticate them based on a database of users. I have it all working based on an example I found online, but the example came with canned certificates and a pre-build JKS datastore. I want to create my own datastore with my own certs but am having no luck.

How do I create a datastore for Tomcat? How do I create a self-signed certificate for Tomcat?

How do I create a self-signed certificate for the client? How do I force Tomcat to trust the signature of the client?

Thank you so much in advance.

I've been playing with java keytool for many hours now. Happy days.

Answer 1

Create certificate:

keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -keystore /home/bob/mykeystore

Enter all the data for the self signed certificate you need then edit Tomcat's server.xml and specify the keystore properties on the SSL connector, e.g.:

<Connector port="8443" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
        maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
        enableLookups="false" disableUploadTimeout="true"
        acceptCount="100" scheme="https" secure="true"
        keystoreFile="/home/bob/mykeystore"
        clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" />

or follow the Tomcat docs...

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/ssl-howto.html

Answer 2

To enable client authentication, you need to specify a "trust store" for Tomcat: a key store containing certificates from the root certification authorities that you trust, each flagged as a "trustEntry".

This is specified by the Connector element's attributes: truststoreFile, truststorePass (which defaults to the value of keystorePass), and truststoreType (which defaults to "JKS").

If a client is using a self-signed certificate, then its "root" CA is the certificate itself; it follows, then, that you need to import the client's self-signed certificate into Tomcat's trust store.

If you have many clients, this will quickly become a hassle. In that case, you might want to look into signing certificates for your clients. The Java keytool command can't do this, but all of the necessary command-line utilities are available in OpenSSL. Or you could look into something like EJBCA on a large scale.

Better yet, ask your clients to use an existing free CA, like startcom.org. This doesn't always work for server certificates, because StartCom's certificate isn't included in all browsers, but this situation is reversed, and the StartCom root certificate could easily be imported to the Tomcat trust store.

Answer 3

Finally got the solution to my problem, so I'll post the results here if anyone else gets stuck.

Thanks to Michael Martin of Michael's Software Thoughts & Ramblings I discovered that:

keytool by default uses the DSA algorithm when generating the self-signed cert. Earlier versions of Firefox accepted these keys without problem. With Firefox 3 beta 5, using DSA doesn't work, but using RSA does. Passing "-keyalg RSA" when generating the self-signed certificate creates a cert the Firefox 3 beta 5 fully accepts.

I simply set that flag, cleared all caches in FireFox and it worked like a charm! I am using this as a test-setup for my project and I need to share this with other people, so I wrote a little batch script that creates two SSL certificates. One can be dropped into the Tomcat setup and the other is a .p12 file that can be imported into FireFox/IE. Thanks!

Usage: first command-line argument is the username of the client. All passwords are "password" (with no quotations). Change any of the hard-coded bits to meet your needs.

@echo off
if "%1" == "" goto usage

keytool -genkeypair -alias servercert -keyalg RSA -dname "CN=Web Server,OU=Unit,O=Organization,L=City,S=State,C=US" -keypass password -keystore server.jks -storepass password
keytool -genkeypair -alias %1 -keystore %1.p12 -storetype pkcs12 -keyalg RSA -dname "CN=%1,OU=Unit,O=Organization,L=City,S=State,C=US" -keypass password -storepass password
keytool -exportcert -alias %1 -file %1.cer -keystore %1.p12 -storetype pkcs12 -storepass password
keytool -importcert -keystore server.jks -alias %1 -file %1.cer -v -trustcacerts -noprompt -storepass password
keytool -list -v -keystore server.jks -storepass password
del %1.cer
goto end

:usage
echo Need user id as first argument: generate_keystore [username]
goto end

:end
pause

The results are two files. One called server.jks that you drop into Tomcat and another file called {username}.p12 that you import into your browser. The server.jks file has the client certificate added as a trusted cert.

I hope someone else finds this useful.

And here is the the XML that needs to be added to your Tomcat conf/sever.xml file (only tested on on Tomcat 6.x)

<Connector
   clientAuth="true" port="8443" minSpareThreads="5" maxSpareThreads="75"
   enableLookups="true" disableUploadTimeout="true"
   acceptCount="100" maxThreads="200"
   scheme="https" secure="true" SSLEnabled="true"
   keystoreFile="${catalina.home}/conf/server.jks"
   keystoreType="JKS" keystorePass="password"
   truststoreFile="${catalina.home}/conf/server.jks"
   truststoreType="JKS" truststorePass="password"
   SSLVerifyClient="require" SSLEngine="on" SSLVerifyDepth="2" sslProtocol="TLS"
/>

Answer 4

Hello all..

You can have more detailed information on this link :Tomcat and SSL