Can not get javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate Attribute in teh servlet request

[Ma, Yongjie]

Hi 

Tomcat 4.1.12, JavaJDK 1.4

I setup my Tomcat + SSL and installed personal certificate for IE browser.  And also 
set clientAuth="true" in SSL connector session of the server.xml.

Then started Tomcat. The browser with personal certificate could access the Tomcat 
example page via SSL, and the browser without certificate can not access. It works 
fine at this point.

But in my servlet I tried to using 
req.getAttribute("javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate") to get client certificate 
information, but it always return null. I tried to type cast it to String, Object or 
(javax.security.cert.X509Certificate), But I got type cast exception, I guess it 
caused by tried to type cast NULL object. The code looks like:
        X509Certificate certs[] = (X509Certificate[])
            request.getRequest().getAttribute(Globals.CERTIFICATES_ATTR);

And I tried to debug tomcat, in the class 
org.apache.catalina.valves.certificatesValve, it did call setAttribute() to set 
javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate, and x509Certs is not null. code looks like:

        // Expose these certificates as a request attribute
        if ((x509Certs == null) || (x509Certs.length < 1))
            return;
        session.putValue(Globals.CERTIFICATES_ATTR, x509Certs);
        log(" expose: Exposing converted certificates");
        request.getRequest().setAttribute(Globals.CERTIFICATES_ATTR,
                                          x509Certs);

Any idea?

Thank you.

Jack