Using self signed certificates - ssl

Question

I am using self signed certificate for HTTPS connection to and from Axis2 server. All of these connections works fine and as desired.
There is a part in my web service which is responsible for sending emails. I am using GMail for the purpose of sending mail.
The problem is when I try to send a mail using an SSL connection I get certificate error, i.e. GMail certificate is not trusted. I had faced a similar problem with JBoss as well. For once I was able to get around this problem downloading GMail certificate and than importing it into the Keystore using Keytool utility. For a long time this had worked.
But only recently I have started to get the Old problem again. I tried to use the old technique that fixed the problem last time, but this time that did not work. (not sure why)
I reckon that GMail uses a signed certificate which out of the box should be trusted by any of the servers, let it be JBoss or Axis2. I fail to figure out what the problem actually is. Is it because of using of Self Signed certificate? Or are there any specific way of creating it so that the Signed certificates are trusted?
Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

To have a SSL encrypted Server/Client communication we need to Keystores and Truststore for Server & Client. Following are the steps to create them.
#Creating Server keystore and exporting a certificate
keytool -genkey -alias serverkeys -keyalg RSA -keystore server.keystore -storepass changeit -keypass changeit -dname "CN=test.com, OU=Test, O=Test, L=London, ST=London, C=UK"
keytool -export -alias serverkeys -keystore server.keystore -storepass changeit -file server.cer
#Creating Client keystore and exporting a certificate
keytool -genkey -alias clientkeys -keyalg RSA -keystore client.keystore -storepass changeit -keypass changeit -dname "CN=test.com, OU=test, O=test, L=London, ST=London, C=UK"
keytool -export -alias clientkeys -keystore client.keystore -storepass changeit-file client.cer
#Making a copy of cacerts file. These copies will be used for client/server truststore
cp /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_14/jre/lib/security/cacerts client.truststore
cp /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_14/jre/lib/security/cacerts server.truststore
#Copying server certificate to Client truststore
keytool -import -trustcacerts -v -keystore client.truststore -storepass changeit -file server.cer
#Copying Client certificate to Server truststore
keytool -import -trustcacerts -v -keystore server.truststore -storepass changeit -file client.cer
During the first few iteration I was not using cacert but directly create truststores from the certificate and that too worked well. Problems came up when we need to connect to some other services using SSL and connection could not be establised even when the service used a Signed Certificate.
For example connecting to GMail SMTP server would faile if the truststore were not created up from cacerts. Reason being even though GMail uses a signed certificate, we wold be using a truststore that would not know if the GMail certificate can be trusted. For this reason we used cacerts to create out truststore. After which we were able to connector any service that uses a Signed Certificate.
If in case we encounter a unsigned certificate we will then have to add them to the Components Truststore.