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Musings on SSL troubles in websphere container

SSL is a standard technology for connecting systems in a client server architecture.

Setting up our Java based applications to use SSL requires setting up keystores and truststores. Java provides a key and certificate management utility called keytool that can be used to setup required key and trust-stores for secure communication.

With websphere, things get a little different.

  • Websphere provides a tool called ikeyman that is used to manage key and trust databases.
  • The JEE container loads the SocketFactory, that an application can refer using SSLSocketFactory.getDefault(), with the certificates from the key and trust databases.
  • The default instance of SSLSocketFactory does not load certificates that might be present in the JRE.

This brings us to a major consideration while working with SSL on websphere. Work only with default SSLSocketFactory. APIs not using default SSLSocketFactory will not work, unless we write code that handles the certificates and sets up SSLSocketFactory to be used.
For example, CXF does not use default SSLSocketFactory unless configured so. It requires setting useHttpsURLConnectionDefaultSslSocketFactory. Refer CXF TLS Config.

But handling certificates ourselves can have unwanted consequences too. A lot of effort goes into troubleshooting when a new third party API (for example, MS Exchange webservices Java API) is added to an application that causes all SSL interactions to fail, while the new API works just fine. It is attributed to the fact that the new API, we added, changed the default SSLSocketFactory in HTTPSURLConnection to a different instance. In such cases, we'd need to modify the API to use default SSLSocketFactory and not change it.
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