Using Portecle to replace command line Keytool interface

Usually default keytool from Sun’s JDK is used to perform local testing on applications involving crytographic operations. Portecle is a nice alternative to achieve a Windows-like behaviour of this tool. It can be launched writing a simple CMD script and executing it from desktop.

WSS in Java

WSS stands for Web Services Security or, shortly, WS-Security. This standard is commonly used to perform secure communications between web services and it’s underlying based on XMLDSig. Most used toolkits in Java for WSS are: XWSS from Sun (as part of the project Glassfish) WSS4J from Apache Both are mature solutions and both cover obligatory part of the standard. However, the

Generating, storing and retrieving Private Keys

Some applications does not work with certificates to perform security operations. Instead of this, raw private keys are used for signature or ciphering. Hence, private keys must be stored as PCKS#8 rather than PCKS#12.   The following code shows how to generate and use a DSA private key of 1024 bits. Note that this key is stored using Base64 encoding