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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T23:18:45+00:00

Our system communicates with several web services providers. They are all invoked from a

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Our system communicates with several web services providers. They are all invoked from a single Java client application. All the web services up until now have been over SSL, but none use client certificates. Well, a new partner is changing that.

Making the application use a certificate for the invocation is easy; setting javax.net.ssl.keyStore and javax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword will do it. However, the problem is now how to make it so that it only uses the certificate when invoking that particular web service. I guess more generally speaking, we’d like to be able to choose the client certificate to be used, if any.

One quick solution could be setting the system properties, invoking the methods, and then unsetting them. The only problem with that is that we’re dealing with a multi-threaded application, so now we would need to deal with synchronization or locks or what have you.

Each service client is supposed to be completely independent from each other, and they’re individually packaged in separate JARs. Thus, one option that has occurred to me (although we haven’t properly analyzed it) is to somehow isolate each JAR, maybe load each one under a different VM with different parameters. That’s merely an idea that I don’t know how to implement (or if it’s even possible, for that matter.)

This post suggests that it is possible to select an individual certificate from a key store, but how to attach it to the request seems to be a different issue altogether.

We’re using Java 1.5, Axis2, and client classes generated with either wsimport or wsdl2java.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Java SSL clients will only send a certificate if requested by the server. A server can send an optional hint about what certificates it will accept; this will help a client choose a single certificate if it has multiple.

    Normally, a new SSLContext is created with a specific client certificate, and Socket instances are created from a factory obtained from that context. Unfortunately, Axis2 doesn’t appear to support the use of an SSLContext or a custom SocketFactory. Its client certificate settings are global.

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