I have an application which authenticates users based on their grid credentials.
It is deployed under Tomcat and uses (among others) following 2 libraries for 
user authentication

cog-jglobus-1.8.0.jar        
cog-tomcat-1.8.0.jar

We have encountered a strange race condition on couple of application server 
nodes (not all of them) when fetch-crl is run to update the CRLs on these nodes.

Error that we see is:
"[JGLOBUS-116] Certificate validation failed. [Caused by: [Caused by: unknown 
object in factory: org.bouncycastle.a
sn1.DERInteger]]"


In process of troubleshooting this, I tried 2 different use cases

o removed CRL file (for CA that I created the credentials under) 
o created empty CRL file  (for CA that user created the credentials under) 

( 1 ) In both cases, I could not reproduce the error message that I mentioned 
above
 
So, my question #1 is:
Do you know what could cause this error message to appear?

( 2 ) The server seemed to behave as expected (give an error like UnknownCA) 
only if I did the file removal/empty file creation before starting it.
i.e. if I did these things while server was running, it *did not* seem to care 
- as if, it is not reloading the CRLs in memory

So, my question #2 is:
Can you explain to me how are these libraries designed to behave in these 
situations? Do the CRLs get loaded/reloaded on their own or do I need to 
explicitly specify some CRL reload interval in the code ?

I see a relevant bug here - 
https://bugzilla.mcs.anl.gov/globus/show_bug.cgi?id=6891

( 3 )  I also noticed that the cog-jglobus library does not complain if the 
TRUSTED_CERTIFICATES directory (in my case - /etc/grid-security/certificates) 
does not exist

So, my question #3 is:
Is that by design?

I am just trying to figure out how to make sure my application loads/reloads 
the CRLs properly. Any help that you can provide is appreciated.


Thanks
------------------------------------------------
Neha Sharma
- Fermilab/FermiGrid/OSG Software
- WH8E/x6791
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