JAVA Key Stores for SOA Security

In a how-to post on SAML OWSM client policies last month, Josh mentioned how he used separate “Alice and Bob” keystores for the client and the service. I think this is a very important notion and would like to expound upon it in this post.

I see too many people building out SOA development and test environments that utilize a single key store for all the components in their environment. Even worse, I see lots of people utilizing the same key and certificate pair for every component in their environment. If your environment is a dev/test environment built on Oracle products, this is likely the ever-popular “orakey” pair.

I believe that it is important to utilize separate keystores and key-certificate pairs for the client, service, and any intermediary components where keys and certificates are required in your development and test environments.

Taking the short cut of having components share keystores and even key-certificate pairs will only burn you down the road as you move forward with the development of your services and applications. Sharing keys and keystores can mask potential issues that will appear when you try to setup real keystores as you approach production. Further, sharing keys and keystores can actually make it more difficult to diagnose and solve certain issues that can occur during the build out and configuration of an environment.

I will now walk you though the simple steps of creating properly configured client “Alice” and service “Bob” keystores using the Oracle CertGen and ImportPrivateKey utilities. Following these steps you can have proper test keystores ready to go in a matter of minutes.

1) Create client (Alice) key-certificate pair signed by the demo CA cert "CertGenCA"

>> java utils.CertGen -certfile AliceCert -keyfile AliceKey -keyfilepass password

2) Create service (Bob) key-certificate pair signed by the demo CA cert "CertGenCA"

>> java utils.CertGen -certfile BobCert -keyfile BobKey -keyfilepass password

3) Create client (Alice) keystore with client key-certificate pair

>> java utils.ImportPrivateKey -certfile AliceCert.der -keyfile AliceKey.der -keyfilepass password -keystore Alice.jks -storepass password -alias alice -keypass password

4) Create service (Bob) keystore with client key-certificate pair

>> java utils.ImportPrivateKey -certfile BobCert.der -keyfile BobKey.der -keyfilepass password -keystore bob.jks -storepass password -alias bob -keypass password

5) Now add the root CA to both stores

>> keytool -importcert -file CertGenCA.der -keystore Alice.jks

>> keytool -importcert -file CertGenCA.der -keystore bob.jks

6) Add bob's public cert to Alice's store. This is needed to configure the recipient alias on the client

>> keytool -importcert -file BobCert.der -alias bob -keystore Alice.jks

7) Use and prosper!