Hello,
This week I was doing mainly research into SSL/TLS, how to use it with Smack and how it is used with Spark. Generally speaking Smack’s connection configuration have method setSSLContext(SSLContext context) where I can specify SSL options. What is SSL? That’s SecureSocetsLayer Protocol which is in charge of maintaining secure connection between two parties (server and client). The most important part of this protocol is keys exchange which might be RSA public keys or symmetric secret keys using Diffie-Hellman exchange. Smack allow me to not dig too deep into that but I still must specify some things with this context. One of this things is providing list of trusted certificates (certificates also contain public Keys). Next week I plan to do some more work on this .
Apart from that I added 3 Keystores for Spark: one for exempted certificates, second for trusted/valid and third one for revoked. Now after clicking on checkbox certificates are added to exceptions list. That means PKI tab in login settings probably will disappear from Spark so it will be using only it’s own Keystores, also due to some weird settings in SSL configuration it wasn’t working as supposed . Also during working on method that moves certificates between Keystores one thing surprised me. It is impossible to load Keystore file that is empty in this case I had to pass “null” as argument for Keystore load method. Not big deal but if I wouldn’t found out it, that could later cause some unpleasant consequences.
Cya,
Paweł