One of the additional features that has been introduced in JSSE 1.4 is the ability to 'want' client certificates instead of 'require'ing them (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/security/jsse/JSSERefGuide.ht ml#NewMethods). It also appears that this functionality is not available in the PureTLS implementation of the SSL protocol (at least that I could find). This feature could be useful in scenarios where some users have client side certificates and some do not. This would still allow both sets of users to connect to the same host, but using different modes of authentication. Another nice thing that this feature would give us is the ability to provide a friendly "You don't have a client certificate and contact this help desk to get your client certificate" instead of not allowing any requests to get into the container.
Considering the fact that this is only applicable to a JDK 1.4.x VM, is this something that could be built into the current distribution? Here are some options that I came up with to get this functionality in Tomcat. 1. Provide an additional argument to the org.apache.coyote.tomcat4.CoyoteServerSocketFactory in server.xml to 'want' certificate authentication. If the underlying SSL implementation does not support that feature, log an error/warning and revert to 'need' certificate authentication. 2. For the org.apache.tomcat.util.net.jsse.JSSE14* classes, change the functionality to 'want' certificates instead of 'need' them. This gives the application and container the ability to give the user an error if they do not have a certificate instead of closing the socket and making the browser show the 'Page can not be displayed' error. This would change existing behavior and thus could be a really bad thing to do. 3. Make my own modifications and don't incorporate into the default distribution. Regards, Mike Becker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
