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SSL Certificate X.509 Export

I'm trying to use a Web Service but I have many doubts about the certificates, I'm quite a novice in this topic, The team that developed the web services sent me a document where explains how to use it but to enable the connection, I need to USE a certificate (X.509), I generated p7b certificate from they website and I imported that certificate in my local environment, Using Keytool -import it generate a JKS file but they warn that I should install "Entrust" (Root and Intermediate) certificates that they provide me I used keytool -import with these .cer files and the command generated one .JKS for each file, I installed those cer too, my question is:
To use that web service Which certificate file I need to attach in my implementation logic in java, the jks or p7b ?
How I can use this certificate in all the Test environment? (I don't know if this certificate can be use only in the PC that generates the CSR).
I'm trying to simulate the call with the SOAPUI app i'm getting the authentication error so Probably something is worng with the certificate.
He implemented all using windows certificate store and .NET they can't give me support for keytool.

To do client authentication (also called mutual authentication) in SSL/TLS you (your program) needs not just a certificate but a certificate PLUS PRIVATE KEY and usually intermediate/chain certs. There are canonically 5 steps in the process:
On your computer generate a key PAIR which consists of a privatekey and a publickey, and a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) which contains the publickey. These steps may be done separately, or combined in a way that you don't notice there are both a CSR and a privatekey.
Submit the CSR to a Certificate Authority (CA) along with evidence of your identity and authorization as appropriate, and payment if the CA requres it.
The CA issues an 'end-entity' certificate (in this case a client cert) containing your publickey and identity(ies) plus some other information and gives you this certificate, usually along with an intermediate certificate or sometimes a few intermediate certs that form(s) a 'chain' from the entity cert to a trusted CA root or anchor cert. A 'p7b' file is one fairly common way, though not the only one, of transporting a group of related certs, such as your entity cert plus your chain cert(s).
You return the entity cert and the chain cert(s) to your computer and combine with your privatekey from step 1.
You use the combination of privatekey PLUS certificate chain with various program(s) such as a browser, a utility like curl, or a custom application.
Details of steps 1 and 4 (and 5) depend on the systems and software you use, which you don't specify in any recognizable way, although it sounds like you are ending up in the Windows certificate store. If that is the case, and it is specifically the Personal section of the current-user store (as opposed to a machine account like SYSTEM), then when you run MMC (aka Administrative Tools) and select the Cert Mgr addin, or directly run certmgr.msc, the icon for the cert should have a yellow key at the left:
Contrary to your Q, Java JCE (at least Oracle-was-Sun Java on Windows) can handle this; run keytool -list -storetype Windows-MY -keystore NONE and see for yourself.
However, some (probably many) Java programs cannot. For those, you need a keystore file containing the privatekey PLUS certificates; to create that run the Export wizard and select 'Yes, export private key', then format PKCS 12 (aka PFX) with 'include ... path'.
Recent updates of Java 8 by default can automatically handle a PKCS12 keystore (look for keystore.type.compat=true in JRE/lib/security/java.security) and older versions can do so if the program configures the store type (I don't know if SoapUI does that). For older versions that require JKS, after exporting to PKCS12 to let's say mykey.p12 convert with
keytool -importkeystore -srcstoretype pkcs12 -srckeystore mykey.p12 -destkeystore mykey.jks

What you try to archivee is something called a mutual-authentication. In order to understand the basics you need to understand that the humans have simply concepted a password to lock and unlock informations by the same (symetric) password. Everyone who knows the one password can
read the message
rewrite the message to send false informations
this is dangerous. So they have invented two different passwords, one for writing (private) and a compleatly different one for receive(public), we call them asymetric. The problem in asymetric encryption was, that you can choose free only one password, the opposite password is calculated and can not be choosen freely.
Finally they invented certificates to simplify the process. Certificates contains strong Passwords packed into files. Without looking into the certificates you dont know if the passwords are private or public, that means p7b(pkcsv7b) and jks can contain the absolute same informations. The difference is the format only, like the difference between .doc and .docx.
The second problem
In the big japaneese war's spionage was a big thing, the agents gathered informations about the opposite at the point of tactics and send theese informations to their real lords to find weaknesses in the tactics/strategys. Whenever a spoin has been uncovered he has been turned into a double-agent faking honeypots to let the warlord make wrong decisions and fall into traps.
So as an warlord you must trust your agent ... but, how to be sure? Well, you can ask the other agents about the agent you have the informations from to have the guarantee that the message can be trusted. So the first agent must ask other agents to sign the message too, this question between agents is the CSR! If the other agent(s) sign too, we have a "chain of trust". Ok we have four parties now, the agent, the signing-agent(s) the enemy(hacker) and you.
What must be placed where? Well, assuming you are a warlord (server),
you need the public passwords of all your clients(agents) in a truststore to send them messages(download),
you need to know your private password to encode messages(posts, requests, uploads) your agents sent.
Assuming you are a agent(client/browser) of a warlord inside the enemys lines (open field of world-wide-web), you must store:
your private key, to send messages and sign messages of other agents
the public key of the warlord to encode orders of your master.
You have learned now that a certificate can contain aswell private keys as public keys. How to technically use them?
You lucky, the keytools is open source, download the sources from grepcode (click here) and you will have your implementations by copy-and-paste.
Some hints for mutual-authentication:
The server should not offer its public certificate because all authenticated clients already have the public certificate(key) in their truststore.
The client's certificate should be sent in a non-electronic way (printed as rf-code or whatever).
The client should presented the server's public key and the clients private key in two seperate physical letters (you may noticed if you use the electronic-cash-card (ec-card) you had two letters, one for the PIN and one for the ec-card).

Should the client have the same keystore as the server?

I am reading about the best way to create a secure connection between a client and a server.
Through this tutorial it seems that the certificate (and the keystore) is not only given to the server, but it is also given to the client.
Isn't this insecure? If the client has the certificate file (in the keystore), won't it have all the server private keys?
In the end what I want is to have a secure/encrypted connection between the client and the server, while the client itself proving to the server that it is an authentic client. Is this the right way to go?
Thanks!

As Boris stated in the first comment, the keystore contains the keys to authenticate and truststore contains the certificates that are trusted, as their names imply.
First of all, a certificate does not have to contain the private key. It is just an identity with a public key (with possibly signed by a trusted party, like CAs). That's why, if you use them appropriately, it is not insecure. What is the appropriate way of this? Here we go:
Before answering your question, i.e. the case that not only the server but also the client is authenticated, let's consider the usual case: only the server is authenticated by the client. In this scenario, we have three parties: Certificate Authority (CA), Server (S) and Client(C). To make it work, you should do the following:
Create a keypair for CA and store it in some ca.jks.
Export the certificate (containing only the public key, not private) from ca.jks and import it into another jks file, namely truststore.jks.
Create another keypair for S and store it in some server.jks.
Sign the certificate of S with the private key of CA. For this procedure, you need to generate a CSR (certificate signing request) from server.jks, sign the csr file with ca.jks and produce some crt (or pem, whatever you want) file containing the signed certificate. Finally you have to import this crt file back to server.jks. It is important to use the same alias as before.
Use server.jks at S as the keystore, and truststore.jks at C as truststore.
Keep ca.jks in a safe place. It is the root of trust.
In this way, C trusts CA since its certificate is in his truststore. Since S has a certificate signed by CA, C will trust S too. In other words, S is authenticated by C.
To achieve what you want, i.e. both parties are authenticated by each other, you will have two certificate authorities, namely CA1 and CA2. (They can be same of course, but I am writing like this for the sake of completeness.) You have to do the procedures above twice: once with CA=CA1 and once with CA=CA2. The first one is exactly like above. In the second one, you will create client.jks, sign it with CA2, and use public key of CA2 as the truststore of the S. (Just the roles of C and S are swapped.) In this way, both parties will authenticate each other.
As I said, you can use the same CA, which is very convenient and reasonable.
I know this is a long answer but be sure that I omitted most details and tried to make it simple. I hope it helps.
EDIT: Again, do not get confused: the client authenticates himself using his private key, stored in his keystore. Certificate is already a public thing...
Regarging your question, of course, if some thief steals the keystore file, then he can imitate himself to be the real client. The server cannot know who he is communicating with, he only validates the certificate. For such scenarios, issued certificates can be revoked. Search for revocation on the web. Simply, if you know that a client's keystore is stolen, you will inform the server about this through revocation, instead of regenerating all key material.
One corner case for this is, certificates are some kind of bindings of public keys with identities. For web servers, which is the usual case, their certificate binds their public key with their hostname, i.e. hostname is their identity. So if abc.com uses the certificate issued for xyz.com, your browser will give an error when you try to connect to abc.com. In Java world, this is called host name verification. The common name field of certificates are used for such identities. (When you generate using openssl or keystore, it may ask you a common name, and it is very important.)
If your clients are actually servers with static IPs or some valid domain names, you can use it. In this way, since the thief will try to connect from some other IP or domain, the server will detect it through hostname verification. However, usually clients do not have such stable identities, thus it is very hard to use this technique, so the thief may be able to imitate the real client.

Keystore's password management

A keystore (no matter if it's used for "keystores" or "truststores") is initialized after creation using the load() method. One version expects an InputStream corresponding to the keystore file, and the password to decrypt the file. Providing the password to the method programmatically seems strange to me.
For example, a server uses a keystore to store its private keys and the associated certificates. The information present in the keystore is sensible so it is protected by a password. What are the problems of passing the password to the load() method programmatically? What is the best practice?
The other example, but for now concerning truststores. The client has a truststore where it stores the certificates of trusted CAs. As I understand it, the truststore doesn't contain the certificate of the server but only the certificates of the CAs that allow verifying the server's certificate. One truststore example I see is the one present with the JRE (in the security folder - cacerts). By looking at the configuration, I can see it is protected by the default password changeit. I understand that a truststore is implemented using a keystore, so it has (or maybe it's optional?) to be encrypted using a password. But, since truststores generally store public information (trusted CA's certificates) in the file, why changing the password is recommended?
Thanks

Providing the password to the method programmatically seems strange to
me.
I'm not sure why this would be strange. The application will need to be able to get hold of the content of the keystore at one point or another. The password will need to be passed to it, somehow. Passing it to the load() method doesn't make less sense than other solutions (avoid hard-coding, of course). Alternatively, you can use the method that uses a callback instead. If you don't think that's suitable, you can use a PKCS#11 provider and a hardware token (although you'll still need to enter the password/PIN somewhere) or use something like the Apple KeychainStore (where the password isn't used, but the OS keychain service takes care of that).
Regarding the truststore, there are in fact two passwords in use. They can be different, when using the JKS format. One protects the keystore itself, and one protects access to the private entries (getKey). In this case, the keystore password is used to prevent unauthorised parties from altering the truststore (and adding their own CA or server certificates).

JBoss/Java and SSL

Hi I'm a bit lost and hope you'll get me out of here. I'll try to be as clear as possible since I don't really understand/know how I should use certificates.
I've got an application that is supposed to communicate with another one using webservices and SSL. We both asked our main "Certificate Authority" to get certificates.
They sent us 4 files and a password for the .P12 file:
.csr, .cer, .key, .P12
Here is what I did :
* Configure JBoss to use SSL on 8443 and used the P12 file as the keystore
To test this I did a small Java class that call a webservices on this server, using :
props.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStore", "/.../.../certif.p12");
props.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword", "XXXXXXXXX");
props.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStoreType", "PKCS12");
The connection works, but I think I'm missing something as I did not use the other files.
If I send my .P12 file and the password to the application that is supposed to call my Webservices will it be ok/enough ?
Edit :
I forgot to mention that I should call a Webservice on the other application too, so it should be the other way around, do I only need a .P12 and pass ?
I've read a lot of thing about public key, private key, keytool but it's a bit messy in my head right now.
Thanks for any information !

They sent us 4 files and a password for the .P12 file: .csr, .cer,
.key, .P12
Ideally, you should have generated the private key (in .key) and CSR (in .csr) yourself and the CA should have come back with the certificate (typically in .cer) based on the CSR, which you would have assembled together to build your PKCS#12 file (.p12).
At this stage, you can discard the CSR. The PKCS#12 file should now contain the private key, its associated certificate and possibly the certificate chain attached. You could extract the .key and .cer files from that .p12 file later again. I guess you were given all these files because of the way they have been generated (using intermediate files), or for convenience, not to have to convert them yourself.
The Java terminology isn't ideal, but keystore and truststore are two entities of type keystore, but with a different purpose. The difference between the KeyManager and TrustManager (and thus between javax.net.ssl.keyStore and javax.net.ssl.trustStore) is as follows (quoted from the JSSE ref guide):
TrustManager: Determines whether the remote authentication credentials (and thus the connection) should be trusted.
KeyManager: Determines which authentication credentials to send to the remote host.
The javax.net.ssl.trustStore* properties are one way of configuring the TrustManager. The javax.net.ssl.keyStore* properties are one way of configuring the KeyManager.
Typically, there is no need for private key material in a trust store (unless you also use the same as a keystore). It's often better to use a separate truststore, which you'd be able to copy freely across machine, without worrying about leaking private key material.
What would make sense would be to build a new keystore (JKS) that you would use as a truststore, using the CA certificates (not sure if you've been provided with them).
You're not doing mutual authentication by setting the truststore only (there are no default values for the keystore, so they need to specify these parameters explicitly). If you want to use your client-certificate to connect to a remote party, you need to set it in the keystore (for example, using the javax.net.ssl.keyStore* properties in the same way you've done it for the trust store).
You could point both the keystore and truststore to the same .p12 file. The side effect is that other connections made by your service to other places (e.g https://www.google.com) would not be trusted, since it wouldn't contain the CA for those. That's why it might be better to create a separate "truststore keystore" (JKS might be easier) for the CA certificates. You could make a copy of the default cacerts (in the JRE directory), import your CA's certificate into it and use that.

I've got an application that is supposed to communicate with another
one using webservices and SSL.
Ok, stop here. Communicate how? I mean is it only server authentication i.e. your client application will authenticate the web service or mutual authentication and the web service will also request your applications certificate?
This is important as the files you present by the names seem to suggest the latter i.e. that mutual authentication is expected while your code you show is only setting SSL library for server authentication.
Since you are not providing context here I would say that:
.key has your private key
.p12 has your private key along with your signed certificate or perhaps the CA's root certificate (?)
cer could have your signed certificate or perhaps the root's CA
signing certificate that is considered as trusted in the domain and
has probably also signed the web service you want to communicate with
certificate (well that is a possibility/guess here since you don't
say much)
csr is your certificate signing request
I did a small Java class that call a webservices on this server, using
What you do in the code is setting the p12 as the truststore.
If you say this works then there is no mutual authentication only server side authentication and you are authenticating the web service using whatever is in the p12.
In this case the rest are not needed for communication.It is for you to keep especially the key file since this could be your private key and if you lose/someone steals this then your private certificate is useless/compromised.
I am not sure what your requirements on security are here, but it seems to me that you should probably look into it more.
Even for this question I just tried to do an educated guess based on the file names.....
I hope this puts you in some track to read.

A straight forward way to open self-signed HTTPS SSL URLs in java?

I'm building an application that needs to open self-signed HTTPS SSL URLs in java. I've learned that you can bypass the SSL problems by adding a call to HttpsURLConnection.setDefaultHostnameVerifier() where you say what hostnames are allowed.
However, I have a second problem where my servers are running self-signed certs. So even with the hostname bypass I'm getting exceptions like:
javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target
I've looked around and the only solutions I've found is to add the certificate to the java key store, but this is a problem for me because I have no control over when or how they update java, and I've read that the keystore isn't preserved between updates, and I have no access to the system outside of the JVM.
My application will only make calls to a single server so if there was a way to bypass the self-signed restrictions, and never consult keystores, it wouldn't be a security problem, but is there a way to do this?

I'm building an application that needs to open self-signed HTTPS SSL
URLs in java. I've learned that you can bypass the SSL problems by
adding a call to HttpsURLConnection.setDefaultHostnameVerifier() where
you say what hostnames are allowed.
There are some misconceptions from your question:
Hostname verification is unrelated to whether the certificate is self-signed or not.
It is a verification that matches the domain you are trying to access with the certificate info (CN or Subject Alt Name).
You would need to configure the verifier if you needed to accept a certificate that did not match the url (not recommended at all!!!)
Concerning the self-signed.
This is irrelevant.
You can configure your application to load your custom truststore which would include the certificate your application will trust. In fact this is the best approach (than using Java's cacerts).
All you have to do is import the certificate in a keystore (JKS or PKCS12) and load it in your custom TrustManagers in your application.
Just google arround, plenty of examples E.g. self-signed-ssl

As much as I hate to say this, sometimes it's better to just go with the flow.
Java is attempting to make applications more secure through the use of proper SSL verification practices. In this case, it is succeeding: had you been able to tell the program "it's okay, accept the untrusted self-signed certificate", your program would have been vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack where Mallory puts his server (with its own self-signed certificate, just as valid as yours!) in between the host and the target it's attempting to communicate with. Then he proceeds to read all the traffic you thought was nice and safe, and you don't even notice.
So, your assertion that telling Java to "trust any self-signed certificate when connecting to this host" is secure is, regrettably, not correct.
You can get free, totally valid SSL certificates from StartSSL. They're good folks.

That's how PKI is supposed to work - you must have complete chain of trust from some trusted certificate stored in you keystore to your certificate. So you can
set you certificate as trusted
ask somebody already trusted (i.e. with trusted certificate in the keystore) to sign you certificate
Trying to bypass that is not good bad idea. You can install you certificate in some Java post-install hook, you may have some cron job checking it periodically or do it in exception handling. You can even download this way a certificate from the server and install it everytime it changes (extracting the cert with openssl is easy). But for god's sake, if you decide to do such thing, at least write some audit log about it to some third machine a make sure somebody reads it.
You can also write "hacker-friendly" on you doors. :)

(Note that when you're talking about "keystore" in your question, you're in fact talking about the trust store (which is a keystore). More details on this unfortunately confusing Java terminology are in this answer.)
My application will only make calls to a single server so if there was
a way to bypass the self-signed restrictions, and never consult
keystores, it wouldn't be a security problem, but is there a way to do
this?
Actually, it would be a security problem. Your application may indeed be intended to call only a single server, but the trust store is precisely there to help make sure you're connecting to the machine you intended to connect to. Without it, you wouldn't be able to know whether you're connecting to that server or a MITM server.
If you want the security provided by SSL/TLS, don't bypass these rules. (In particular, don't use a trust manager that will accept any certificate.)
I've looked around and the only solutions I've found is to add the
certificate to the java key store, but this is a problem for me
because I have no control over when or how they update java, and I've
read that the keystore isn't preserved between updates, and I have no
access to the system outside of the JVM.
Quoting myself from this answer (to a more specific question):
The right way is to import this self-signed certificate into the client's trust store, using keytool for example:
keytool -import -file server-cert.pem -alias myserver -keystore mytruststore.jks
You can either do it directly in the JRE's trust store (lib/security/cacerts), which may lack some flexibility, or do it in your own copy of this file, which you then set as the trust store (the default password is changeit or changeme on OSX). You configure this truststore globally for your application using the usual javax.net.ssl.trustStore* system properties (e.g. -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=mytruststore system property (and -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword`). [...]
You don't actually have to use the trust store provided by the JRE (and which may be updated regularly). You could import your self-signed cert into a new empty keystore, which you'll use as a trust store within your application (don't import the private key with it). How to discuss trust store management was in fact discussed in this question: nothing prevents you from using a different trust store specifically for your application or part of it (and in fact Sun/Oracle make no guarantee as to the suitability of the default trust store).
I'm building an application that needs to open self-signed HTTPS SSL
URLs in java. I've learned that you can bypass the SSL problems by
adding a call to HttpsURLConnection.setDefaultHostnameVerifier() where
you say what hostnames are allowed.
While it may indeed by slightly less of a problem if you only have a single self-certificate in your trust store, host name verification is also an essential component of the security provided by SSL/TLS. Don't bypass it, verify that the certificate you're connecting to matches the name you're trying to connect to. (To make an analogy, if you want to check someone's identity, you not only want to check the their passport was emitted by a country whose passports you trust, but you'll also want to check they have the right name inside, otherwise you could be in front of anyone from that country.)
Making the CN= RDN of the Subject Distinguished Name of your self-signed certificate be the host name of the server should be enough, although it's the legacy way of doing it. You may also want to add the Subject Alternative Name extension. More on this in this answer.
Generally speaking do not bypass the SSL "problems". These mechanisms are precisely in place to make the usage of SSL/TLS secure.