Of course JRun supports client-side certificates. Its part of the Servlet spec.

You have to enable your server for SSL and to also require client certificates.

Then, the certificate information is available to JRun servlets.

HOWEVER, exactly what is available depends on the server that you use. For 
Netscape, for example, you can use the certificate factory to actually get the 
client's certificate. For others, they are in environment variables that are 
generally NOT listen in the environment variable enumerations.

So, you write a small perl script to list them all. Then if you know what they 
are, you can get them in your servlets and do your own secure access control 
with NO cookies and NO URL rewriting.

I wrapped a perl electronic Lab Notebook in a JRun 3-based servlet to wenable 
full PKI authentication and authorization.

It all works best if you have your own CA, because you can untrust all other 
CAs, and then your users will only get presented with a choice of your 
certificate to use. That is the first big access control hurdle. Then, you can 
easily use any field in the CN for access decisions. Even better, you can add 
your own custom fields in the certificate for role-based access control decisions.

I attach a recent talk which points out some pitfalls. I STRONGLY recommend 
NOT using IIS or IE, as they are totally insecure and the users cannot figure 
out howe to protect their certificates with IE. Mozilla does a great job with 
certificates now.

Jim
-- 
James A. Rome
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Computer Science and Mathematics Division
Building 3546, MS 6013
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6013
Phone: (865) 574-1306
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
URL: http://www.ornl.gov/~jar

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