Succesful EAC ePassport PKI interoperability tests

EJBCA was present on the Prague event for PKI interoperability tests, since both Sweden and Portugal uses EJBCA for their EAC CVC PKI. The tests were a huge success and no problems were encountered in EJBCA. Interoperability was tested with many different countries using different implementations and algorithms.

Look out for EJBCA 3.7.1, that will bring ECC support (as tested on the event) and a lot of CVC usability enhancements.

Bouncycastle supported by Lock Box Labs

My favorite open source project, the Java crypto provider Bouncycastle (http://www.bouncycastle.org/) have gotten their own legal entity offering support contracts. Go get one!

Cert-cvc library 1.2.7 released

This release of the CV certificate library, for EAC 1.11 ePassports, contains full support for both RSA and ECC algorithms.

This marks another milestone for ePassport support in EJBCA. The cert-cvc library now has full support and can be freely used by anyone under the LGPLv2 license.

Changes:
- Support for ECC keys and signatures, need BC version 1.41 which is included in svn.
- Fix bug where outer signature in authenticated requests did not include CARef in TBS
- Don't add caRef if not passed, or passed as null, to CertificateGenerator.
- Translations of Swedish javadoc to English.


Cheers,
Tomas

Oasis Open Standards Forum in London

On the 30th of September to 3rd of October Oasis will hold Open Standard Forum near London. For more information see the official website.

I'm also excited about listening to the other speakers at the event, covering many different areas of identity- and key management.

I have been accepted as a speaker and will talk about XML protocol interfaces to a PKI. I will mostly use case studies to kind of outline the requirements of an XML protocol. The most detailed case study is the Hardtoken Management Framework developed by Philip in cooperation with the Swedish police (www.hardtokenmgmt.org). The hardtoken management framework is the basis for the smart card management at the Swedish police and uses Webservice interface to communicate with the PKI.
On interesting topic, where we might receive some feedback(?), is what happened to XKMS and if there is any future efforts in that direction. Also looking more into the future we may see a merging of symmetric key management (EKMI) and PKI management.

Maybe we'll see some standardization in this area?

If you have your ways pass London you should join.

EJBCA gets ePassport contribution from Swedish National Police Board

The open source enterprise PKI software EJBCA has received support for EU EAC ePassports. The Swedish National Police Board has developed the cert-cvc java library used for the implementation, and contributes the library to the open source project under the LGPL license. The Police Board also supported the development to integrate the library into EJBCA.

EAC, short for Extended Access Control, is the standard developed in the EU to protect fingerprint and iris data stored on electronic travel documents (passports). Fingerprints will be stored on all EU passport within a few years, with pilot project starting this year. Releasing the library to the open source means that other EU member states does not have to develop everything themselves, and could make implementation much easier and less expensive.
A perfect example of openness and cooperation.

This release is feature complete for EU EAC ePassports using RSA algorithm. ECC support is still not complete. Any help in the ECC area is welcome.

The library is released, with full source, and can be downloaded from sourceforge — http://sourceforge.net/projects/ejbca/."

EJBCA HA best practices

There are many ways to design a HA system taking all considerations into account. After dealing with this issue for a couple of years, here is our teams experience on what works and what doesn't work.

There are two important components in a HA EJBCA setup:

• Database
• EJBCA application server

The database is by far the trickiest to set up in HA-mode. The database holds everything that is really important in an EJBCA setup.
In case of failure, everything can be re-created from the EJBCA distribution except the database contents.
A full HA setup would look like:

• Load balancers in front of the EJBCA app servers
• EJBCA app servers using a single HA database on a single ip
• Load balancers in front of the database cluster
• A HA database cluster

This is of course expensive and this setup is suitable for organizations with dedicated database/app server/load balancer groups that have the resources and knowledge to handle this kind of system.

Most shops however simply don't want, don't need, or can't handle that kind of complexity.

Another alternative, that does not provide full HA, but that does provide very good data safety with short fail over times is:

• Two combined EJBCA/database servers with three ip's, one real for each server and one "virtual" that can be moved.
• Node 1 has the virtual ip by default.
• Database master on node 1 that replicates, in real time, to node 2.
• EJBCA running on both nodes using the "virtual" ip as database ip.
• If node 1 fails, a script must be manually run that changes the virtual ip to node 2, and restarts app server on node 2. Now node 2 is master and single point of failure while node 1 is brought up again.
• When node 1 is brought up again the system is either restored to original state with node 1 as master (requires restoring database on node 1 and reseting replication), or node 2 is now the master and replicates to node 1 (requires starting replication in that direction).

Other alternatives that you might start to look at is to include software load balancers and automatic fail-over scripts in the combined servers.
In our experience this is not a good idea!
In most cases this setup will cause more problems than it solves and your issues will originate from the load balancing software/fail-over scripts not working instead of the database/EJBCA not working.
If you are not sure what you are doing and has done this kind of setups several times before, stay away from it.

Using UTF-8 in mysql

To use EJBCA-JBoss-MySQL with exotic UTF-8 characters you need to configure MySQL to create the tables with utf-8 character encoding, eotherwise you will get an exception when trying to save a subjectDN for a user.

To use utf8 in mysql you have to set the following options in my.cnf:
default-character-set=utf8
collation-server = utf8_general_ci

BEFORE you start MySQL, create the database and start JBoss.

To check the encoding of the tables:
mysql -u root -p
> use information_schema;
> select table_schema,table_name, table_collation from tables;
| ejbca2 | UserData | utf8_general_ci |
| ejbca2 | UserDataSourceData | utf8_general_ci |
| ejbcatest | AccessRulesData | latin1_swedish_ci |
| ejbcatest | AdminEntityData | latin1_swedish_ci |

Default when installing MySQL in ubuntu is to create with 'table_collation' latin1_swedish_c1', but we want 'utf8_general_ci', which it creates in a database created with the new settings in my.cnf.