I am pretty sure I have been using certificates with the SSL extensions (both 
client and server) for signing for years.  I do believe they had some combo of 
Digital signature, Non-repudiation, and Key encipherment as Key Usage 
extensions depending on if it was a client/user or server cert.  If you check 
out SSL certificates from your favorite Web site, you can get an idea of what 
the typical SSL server certificate looks like. 

If you want to know specifically what a working certificate looks like, have a 
look at the key stores used in the unit/integration tests in CXF [1] (passwords 
are in the properties files) and I also have some I use at my blog [2] 
(password is password for all keys).  You can check these using KeyTool or 
Portecle.  These should all look very similar to the certificates you find on 
Web sites.

You raise a good point that application (Web service) identity is not 
necessarily tied to machine identity (a host or host name), but you can use the 
same identity for both.

Hopefully somebody who has actually been through the entire process can chime 
in and confirm since I have always had the certificates handed to me or 
self-generated for development.

[1] http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cxf/trunk/rt/ws/security/src/test/resources/
[2] http://code.google.com/p/davidvaleri/source/browse/projects/examples/pki/

On Mar 28, 2011, at 6:24 PM, paul wrote:

> Hi, I'm using CXF 2.2.10 along with WS-Security for signatures.  I need to
> obtain a CA-signed certificate for use in production, but there does not
> appear to be much (in the search engines) on how to request this from a
> company like Verisign, Thawte, etc.  I understand that the process involves
> creating a CSR... but the public CAs seem to offer two kinds of certificate
> signing: "SSL" or "Code Signing".  It seems like what's needed for
> WS-Security is neither of those (it's not a web-site, nor is a JAR file
> being signed), so how would one go about submitting the CSR to Verisign (or
> any other similar public CA)? Would an SSL certificate work for a SOAP
> Signature, when using CXF?

Reply via email to