eIDAS and PSD2, what's new for PKI and what can you do?

What does PSD2 have to do with eIDAS?

With the introduction of the Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2) in EU there are many changes for Payment Service Providers, but there are also some changes for eIDAS (Trust Service Providers (TSPs). Payment service Providers (PSPs) will be required to use Qualified Certificates for electronic seals and website authentication. Specifically for PSPs there are new fields in the QC statement in certificates issued to for this purpose. With PSD2 the QC statement is an interesting mix of issuer specific field (static) and subject specific fields (dynamic). For general eIDAS QC statement information see our earlier blog post.

PSD2 Specific Certificate Fields

The PSD2 specific fields are specified in the recently released ETSI Technical Specification ETSI TS 119 495 in section 4.

Lets look at the new fields and what they mean. There are four required fields in TS 119 495:

• Authorization number
• Roles of PSP
• NCAName
• NCAId

The authorization number is a registration number of the payment service provider. This number must be included in the Subject DN of the certificate, in the organizationIdentifier DN attribute. This is a dynamic field, different for each certificate issued to different PSPs, but the same for multiple certificates issued to the same PSP. OrganizationIdentifier is supported in EJBCA Enterprise PKI from version 6.5.2. The other three elements are part of the QC statement.

PSD2 Qualified Certificate Statement

The PSD2 specific fields in the qualified certificate statement are specified in ETSI Technical Specification ETSI TS 119 495 in section 5.

Every PSD2 Third Party Payment Service Provider can have one or more of four different roles (described in section 4.2 of TS 119 495). This means this must be a dynamic field to be set by the TSP when issuing the certificate to the PSP. The four roles are account servicing (PSP_AS), payment initiation (PSP_PI), account information (PSP_AI) and issuing of card-based payment instruments (PSP_IC).

The NCAName and NCAId is the name and ID of the National Competent Authority (NCA). This is for example BaFin in Germany. These are specific to the country where the PSP is registered. Since TSPs can issue certificates within any country in EU, this also means that the NCAName and NCAId fields must be dynamic fields to be set by the TSP when issuing the certificate to the PSP.

PSD2 QC Statements is supported out of the box in EJBCA Enterprise PKI from version 7.0.0. In earlier versions they can be created with custom extensions in order to produce test certificates.

Creating PSD2 Certificates with EJBCA

To issue PDS2 certificates with EJBCA Enterprise (7.0.0 and later):

• Check the ETSI PSD2 QC Statement checkbox in the Certificate Profile
• Include the PSD2 specific fields when issuing the certificate

./ejbcaClientToolBox.sh EjbcaWsRaCli edituser psd2 foo123 true "CN=PSD2 eSeal Certificate,organizationIdentifier=12345678-9876,O=PrimeKey,C=SE" NULL NULL ManagementCA 1 PEM NEW User Client NULL  NULL NULL "QCETSIPSD2ROLESOFPSP=0.4.0.19495.1.1;PSP_AS" "QCETSIPSD2NCANAME=PrimeKey Solutions AB, Solna Access, Plan A8, Sundbybergsvägen 1, SE-17173 Solna" "QCETSIPSD2NCAID=SE-PK"

You can also set PSD2 specific fields in the web UI (EJBCA 7.0.1 and later), by specifying those to be used in the End Entity Profile:

After that you will be able to enter PSD2 fields in the Admin UI and the RA UI:

PSD2 Certificate Timeline

Payment services must provide account information and payment services with adequate documentation of the technical interface and a corresponding test environment that works with PSD2 certificates from March 14th 2019. From September 14 2019, all service providers must be PSD2-compliant.

EJBCA Enterprise

We strive to support all relevant open PKI standards and it is important to keep EJBCA Enterprise up to date with new and emerging standards. Since EJBCA 6.5.2 eIDAS compliance should be easily achieved on the level of PKI, and the new PSD2 specific QC statement is fully supported in EJBCA 7.0.1.

Cheers,
Tomas Gustavsson
CTO 

 EJBCA Enterprise PKI and PKI Appliance developed by PrimeKey.

EJBCA is a registered trademark of PrimeKey Solutions AB in the EU, the United States, Japan and certain other countries.

The (updated) Definitive EJBCA Upgrade Guide

With the release of EJBCA 7.0 and subsequent drop of support for JDK7/JEE6, we've updated the upgrade guide that we published back in 2017 to reflect these changes. With no further ado, here it goes:

tl;dr:

The official steps for upgrading any EJBCA installation are:

If running EJBCA < 4.0.16 on JDK6 or earlier:

1. Upgrade to EJBCA 4.0.16
2. Run ant upgrade from the console
3. Run ant post-upgrade from the console
4. Continue below

If running EJBCA >= 4.0.16 but < 5.0.12 on JDK6 or earlier:

1. Upgrade to EJBCA 6.3.2.6
2. Run ant upgrade from the console
3. Run ant post-upgrade from the console
4. Upgrade to JDK8 
5. Upgrade application server to a JEE7 supporting application server
6. Deploy the latest version of EJBCA 
7. Run ant upgrade from the console
8. Run post-upgrade from the UI

If running EJBCA >= 5.0.12 but < 6.4.0:

1. Upgrade to JDK8 
2. Upgrade application server to a JEE7 supporting application server 
3. Upgrade to latest version of EJBCA 
4. Run ant upgrade from the console
5. Run post-upgrade from the UI

If running EJBCA >= 6.4.0:

1. Upgrade to latest version of EJBCA 
2. Run post-upgrade from the UI

Example:

A typical upgrade path:

1. EJBCA 4.0.16 (on JDK6, JBoss 5.1.0.GA) 
2. EJBCA 6.3.2.6 (on JDK6, JBoss 5.1.0.GA) 
3. EJBCA 6.3.2.6 (on JDK8, WildFly 12) 
4. EJBCA 7.x

Concepts

The background to writing this guide both stems from the understandable confusion in regards to upgrading EJBCA and many of our users experiencing problems when upgrading decade old installations. Thus there are some concepts we'd like to go through and explain:

The Intermediate Release: EJBCA 6.3.2.6

During EJBCA 6.8.0 we refactored the roles and access rules massively, which lead to an upgrade break when upgrading from versions of EJBCA prior to 5.0 (though upgrading via EJBCA 5.0 was still possible). As we realized that solving this issue while preserving 100% uptime requirements (see below) was impossible, as well as due to the technology jump (see the next section) and bugs that we discovered while testing upgrading from ancient installations, we created EJBCA 6.3.2.6 in order to handle all the intermediate steps. As of today EJBCA 6.3.2.6 is published and available in the Community Edition on SourceForge, and in the download area for customers.  

Technology Jump - JDK6 → JDK7

When: EJBCA 6.4.0

All good things must come to an end, as must support for legacy runtime versions. As much as we value not having to put our customers through unnecessary hoops by forcing them to upgrade underlying technology such as the JDK, at some point we have to drop support due for several reasons: being held back by not being able to use modern developments, because other dependent systems like Application Servers drop support as well and because the JDKs themselves come to the end of their service lives and will no longer receive support from the vendor. 

Technology Jump - JEE5 → JEE6

When: EJBCA 6.4.0

In EJBCA 6.4.0 we decided to move on to JDK7, which means that it can no longer be deployed to application servers based on JDK6 such as JBoss versions 4 and 5. The latest version that can still run under JDK6 is EJBCA 6.3.2.6. For an upgrade path this means that you can continue running on your old JBoss 5.1.0.GA server (JEE5) up to, and including, the EJBCA 6.3.2.6 intermediate release. At this stage you must upgrade JDK and the application server to JDK8 and JBoss EAP 7 or WildFly 10.

Technology Jump - JDK7 → JDK8

When: EJBCA 7.0.0

With the planned drop of official support from JDK7 from Oracle during 2019, we've decided to drop JDK7 support. Internally this allows us to upgrade now aging libraries which have long since ceased receiving security updates.

Technology Jump - JEE6 → JEE7

When: EJBCA 7.0.0

The loss of JEE6 support means that we've taken the chance to upgrade persistence definition files and library schemas to JEE7 standards. This means that EJBCA will no longer render on JEE6 application servers, meaning that minimal supported AS's are JBoss EAP7/Wildfly 10. 

100% Uptime during Upgrade

When: EJBCA 4.0

While this may be familiar to many of you, EJBCA has ever since version 4.0 supported full uptime during upgrades for clustered installations. What this means is that we pledge that a clustered installation can continue to sign certificates, issue CRLs and answer OCSP queries during the upgrade process with no noticeable downtime for the end user. 

This is why the upgrade process you may be familiar with is split up into two steps: upgrade and post-upgrade. In short, upgrade performs whatever steps may be required for the first node to be upgraded to be able to function once it comes online again, while post-upgrade performs whatever steps that remain (such as clean up) that can only be performed once all nodes are running the latest code. 

Automatic Upgrade

When: EJBCA 6.4.0

Stunningly, prior to EJBCA 6.4.0 we hadn't actually thought of tracking the database version internally, thus requiring our user to manually enter this value. From EJBCA 6.4.0 and later we do in fact track this, doing away with the need to run the upgrade command entirely. Instead, it'll be automatically run from the first node running the upgraded code. 

post-upgrade from Console

When: EJBCA 6.8.0

In a similar vein, as more and more of our customers run EJBCA on the PrimeKey Appliance and thus don't have access to the command line. As of EJBCA 6.8.0 it's been possible to perform post-upgrades from the UI. When a post-upgrade is required, the System Upgrade option will appear in the menu:

Choosing it will bring you to a screen used to perform the post-upgrade action:

Conclusion

With this blog post and our latest round of QA, we hope that we've solved all existing upgrade issues, and that we can make running the latest version of EJBCA as easy and manageable as possible.

Cheers!
Tomas Gustavsson
CTO

Mike Agrenius Kushner
Product Owner EJBCA

EJBCA 7.0.0: The Same, but Completely Different

It's not often that we get to celebrate the emergence of a major release of EJBCA, and this has been a long time coming. World, meet EJBCA 7!

So what's new you ask? New workflows? VR based UI? Is everything solved using blockchains, machine learning and quantum cryptography?

Well, we're afraid not. What we actually have done is dug down and replaced nearly all of the backing code for the UI, some of which has been around ever since EJBCA's inception back in 2002. Same old trusty EJBCA, but with a newly furnished engine. While this may sound a bit lackluster at first glance, this is the first major beachhead that will allow the PrimeKey team to start making great strides in improving EJBCA's user experience for our customers and their clients. This is not the end, but the start of an exciting new journey.

Technology Leap to JDK8/JEE7

Probably the most impactful change of upgrading to EJBCA 7 is that we're dropping support of JDK7, and by extension JEE6 reliant application servers. In essence, from here on in that means that the minimum supported application server is JBoss EAP7/Wildfly 10. If your current installation is running on an earlier JDK or application server we recommend upgrading those first, going through an intermediate release of EJBCA if necessary. The EJBCA Upgrade Guide has detailed instructions for which workflow to follow if this applies to you.

This leap is partly motivated by the end of professional support for JDK7 from Oracle coming this summer, but also because it both allows us to upgrade older libraries (which have long since ceased receiving security updates) and to be able to make use of much of the newer technology which has been developed in the intervening years in order to improve your user experience.

JDK11 Support

While not completely tried and tested yet, we've begun implementing support for JDK11, and have it working in our test environment. For production environments, we recommend sticking to JDK8 for the time being, but for the adventurous among you, we would by all means appreciate any feedback.

Roadmap Update

Deprecating the Public Web and slimming down the CA Web UI

As mentioned above, we're heading into an exciting new era for EJBCA. The time has come for us to finally begin deprecating old functionality, and as we have mentioned before, two primary sections are on the chopping block: RA functionality in the CA Web and the Public Web, with the intent of them being fully replaced by the RA Web.

Our goal in the coming months is to replicate the remaining missing features in the RA Web (we're nearly there), and further improve workflows in order to minimize context switching between the UIs, leading to a more natural user experience for EJBCA administrators. Once we feel secure that this is done we're going to perform a soft drop of the pages (hiding them by default, but still making them available if needed) before dropping them entirely in the long term. If your workflows still rely on those two feature sets, we recommend taking a look at the RA Web.

Appliance Release

EJBCA 7 (or a later minor release) will be included in Appliance version 3.3.0 and is scheduled towards the end of Q1.

Cheers!
Mike Agrenius Kushner
Product Owner, EJBCA