Develop Reference

Periodically change SSL certificate at runtime

I am building an internal PKI for our microservices. The way it works right now is
There's an Offline Root CA and online Issuing CA
on start up a microservice
generates a keypair , a csr and keystore
loads the CA certificate into it's truststore
sends a request to Issuing CA to sign the certificate
gets new certificate and stores it
What we envision is to create a short lived (say 24 hours or less in validity) certificate for each microservice and when it is about to or when it expires the microservice should generate a new CSR and get it signed and continue working as usual. Is this possible and what are the challenges to be faced if were to go in this direction ?

Leaving aside why you need such a low refresh time for an internal network, your architecture is viable
To consider:
The issuing CA must be online and should process the CSR and return a valid certificate during the startup of the microservice and have a reasonably short response time
The public certificate of the Offline Root CA should be included previously in the trustsore of each microservice. I would recommend to include it programmaticaly to avoid security risks
Check if your SSL server is hot-swappable and the certificate can be updated during start-up or they must be done before the microservice starts (not all servers support it)
Note that you will not be able to use SSL-pinning
SSL pinning is implemented adding the server certificate to the truststore instead of the issuing CA to avoid that other certificate of the same CA is accepted
The certificate is usually installed manually an offline in the client truststore but in your case you have to distribute each certificate to the clients that are going to use the microservice. The solution is unpractical due to you have to.securize the channel, distribute them to each client, install them and ensure all steps are synchronized.
Do not forget also that the old certificates must be deleted from truststore because if they are present, they still would be accepted by clients

hitting javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: peer not authenticated even imported cert

Good day,
As my understanding, if an application needs to connect to a https web service, I have to download the cert from the URL and import the cert to WAS Console. This is working fine for me.
Until today, the application has to call a new https URL. Same way, I download the cert and import the cert into WAS Console, but application hitting peer not authenticated error.
After my checking, this URL is using CA cert, not the self-sign cert that I imported usually. May I know is it the way to import CA cert into WAS Console different?
Based on the screen shot below, I imported total 3 cents.
Am I doing the correct way? or for CA cert URL, I need to ask cert from the URL owner? instead of downloading myself.
Will it be caused by protocol issue? I already set the WAS setting protocol to SSL_TLSv2
Kindly advise.

WebSphere has a "retrieve signer from port" function in the SSL Certificate Management UI. That will connect to the host/port you instruct it to and find the root, self-signed issuer (if the server sends it, it's not required) and add it as trusted.
If the server does not send its root, self-signed issuer, you can always look at the last certificate it provides in the chain and add it manually.

com.ibm.jsse2.util no trusted certificate found

I created a java agent that needs to connect to an API internaly. The protocol used is HTTPS. When the agent tries to connect to the API it throws the following error:
com.ibm.jsse2.util: no trusted certificate found. This all is running on a Domino 9.0.1fp3 server. The SSL certificate is a self signed certificate with a custom certificate authority.
I tried the following solution http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21588966 but to no success. Even when we restarted the server it does not correctly pick up the certificate chain. As a last resort we created a little java class that ignores SSL certificates that are self signed. But ofcourse this is not a great solution.
I was wondering if someone also encountered this issue and knows how to solve it.

Apparently IBM forgot to mention that you actually need to restart the whole server for this to work....

Determining which certificate to use in two way ssl

I'm having an issue sending our certificate (client) to another server during a web service call.
We're expected to return the certificate with the CN:
b2b-test
however whenever we receive the servers certificate and attempt to send our own, we're getting:
Unable to find valid certificate path to requested target
From my understanding, if I put our certificate b2b-test inside of our keystore jre/lib/security/cacerts, then when receiving the server request, it should send the appropriate certificate.
How does the client know which key from the keystore it should send to the server? Should I be specifying the exact certificate to send during my request, or is it enough for it to be in the keystore?
Currently the server is sending back the certificate
b2b-a
The certificate chain shows:
*** Certificate chain
chain [0] = [
[
Version: V3
Subject: CN=b2b-a, OU=Web Technologies
The URL for the service is:
https://b2b-a/service
If I configure it like one way ssl, and put the servers certificate into our cacerts, then it picks up their cert and fails the handshake (I'm assuming because it's expecting our cert and not theirs back due to it being a two way setup).
I'm a little stumped here. Any clarification on what I've said is greatly appreciated.

The "Unable to find valid certificate path to requested target" error usually occurs when one side passes a certificate for which the other side doesn't trust any of the certs in the chain. You'll generally (always?) see the error message on the side that's receiving the cert (the side that's missing the truststore).
If you're the client and they're the server, one-way SSL would send their cert from them to you and you would validate it (making sure that the hostname matches the content in the cert), but it would not send any cert from you to them nor would they do any validation.
You'll want to make sure you're configuring a truststore that contains either the b2b-a certificate or a certificate that was used to sign it (but that cert doesn't appear to have any root CAs, so you're stuck with directly importing the cert itself). So yes, you want to do what you wrote in your post and put their certificate into your cacerts. And you'll also need to make sure that the b2b-a service trusts the cert you're sending (or a root CA that was used to sign your cert, if any), so you'll need to put your cert into their cacerts as well, or do something equivalent.
Note that putting a cert in cacerts (or in a truststore JKS) DOES NOT send any certs to anyone; any truststore is used only to allow you to validate that you trust the certificate someone else provides you, either because you trust the cert or because you trust a CA cert that was used to sign the cert. No certs are picked out of the cacerts directory to send to another machine.
If you're using a JKS rather than the JRE directory (which is generally a better idea, since you can specify a different set of trusted certs for your process without changing the default set for anyone running a Java project within your JRE), it's possible to use the same JKS as both a keystore and a truststore (you'll just provide the same filename and password for both the keystore and the truststore properties), or you can have two separate files; either approach will work.

From my understanding, if I put our certificate b2b-test inside of our keystore jre/lib/security/cacerts, then when receiving the server request, it should send the appropriate certificate.
Certainly not. That's a truststore. A source of trusted certificates. Don't mess with it. It isn't used for the purpose you require and in any case it is updated every Java dot release, which clobbers your changes.
Your own certificate and private/public key pair should go in a file of your own, a keystore, which is defined to JSSE by the javax.net.ssl.keyStore and javax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword system properties, or by more complex means described in the JSSE Reference Guide.
The keystore is a precious and confidential file containing your private key. Guard and protect it. Private key leakage would compromise your security and identity.

Using certificates in a client-application consuming a web service

I am implementing a VB.NET desktop application which consumes a web service.
The web service implemented in Java and I currently using Tomcat on my localhost to host the web service.
The web service requires secure communication with the client and so I have followed instructions that outlined how to use Java's keytool.exe to create two .jks keystores (one for the client and one for the server) and then create two .cer certificates (one for the client and one for the server)
I have placed the keystores and certificates generate into the directory where the web service is expecting them (according to the instructions)
I have installed the certificates into TrustedPeople and have attempted to use the certificate by setting the ClientCredentials.ClientCertificates property like this:
myServiceProxy.ClientCredentials.ClientCertificate.SetCertificate(storeLocation.CurrentUser, StoreName.TrustedPeople, X509FindType.FindByIssuerName, "name")
I keep getting the following error message when I try to call any method:
An error was discovered processing the <wsse:Security> header
My problem is that I don't know how to use this in the VB.NET client application that is consuming the web service. I could be doing this completely wrong. Any guidance on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
-Frinny

While I haven't coded VB for 10 years, this should get you started: http://www.example-code.com/vbdotnet/ssl_client_certificate.asp
especially this looks like it is loading the file containing the certificate:
certStore.LoadPfxFile("chilkat_secret.pfx","secret")
and this extracts the certificate and uses it for the connection:
Dim cert As Chilkat.Cert
cert = certStore.FindCertBySubjectCN("Chilkat Software, Inc.")
If (cert Is Nothing ) Then
MsgBox(certStore.LastErrorText)
Exit Sub
End If
socket.SetSslClientCert(cert)

When I had to work with certificates and WS, I had lots of issues with the them too. Use the certificates MMC and verify:
That you placed the certificate in the correct place. Note that there is a CurrentUser store, Machine Store etc. Make sure you put the certificate in the correct one according to your code.
Which user is running your application? Is the certificate located in it's store? The certificate must be visible to the user.
Open the certificate and make sure it is trusted (you will see a warning if not). You may need to put your CA's certificate in Trusted Certification Authorities store.
Make sure that the algorithms you use on each side are supported by the other side.
Note that you are looking for the certificate by issuer name X509FindType.FindByIssuerName, "name" open the certificate, make sure the issuer name matches (I guess not since it seems like copy&paste from example).
If all of this fails, try to experiment with the certificate location (I vaguely remember some issue with being able to use certificates from one location and not the other), and with the property you use to search for the certificates.
Plus, since you asked about certificates I answered about certificates. It's a good idea to check if there's an inner exception and see - it may be another problem.