Hi,

I'm having a hard time getting to grips with WS-Trust in CXF. The
interoperability demo works just fine, but I find it difficult to understand
exactly what is going on.

The following properties don't seem to be documented anywhere on the CXF Web
site:

ws-security.signature.properties
ws-security.signature.properties.decrypt

So I had a peek at the source code to try and figure out what these
properties are for. I could not really figure out how the
ws-security.signature.properties.decrypt property is meant to be used. To be
specific, I need to talk about a particular scenario.

The scenario I am currently looking at is
Scenario_7_IssuedTokenOverTransport_UsernameOverTransport. Briefly, this
WS-Trust scenario has the following characteristics:

* Uses HTTPS transport.
* Client authenticates itself to STS using UsernameToken credentials.
* Client requests SAML token from STS.
* Client's certificate is Alice, STS certificate is WssIP, Service's
certificate is Bob.
* STS has the public key from the Service's certificate and the Service has
the public key from the STS certificate. [This is according to the scenario
description document from the WCF Interoperability Lab.]

In the client configuration, the ws-security.signature.properties.decrypt
property references Bob's PKCS#12 certificate (which includes both a public
key and a private key). As far as I can tell from the source code, the
client uses this certificate to decrypt the SAML token received from the
STS. Now if the STS has only got Bob's public key, the STS must be using
Bob's public key to encrypt the SAML token and that suggests that the client
is using Bob's *private* key to decrypt the SAML token.

This is where I get confused. In a real deployment, it seems to me that the
client would not have access to Bob's private key (it belongs to the remote
service). Have I interpreted the source code correctly?

Cheers,
Fintan
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