A new Crypto implementation in Apache WSS4J

Apache WSS4J uses the Crypto interface to get keys and certificates for asymmetric encryption/decryption and signature creation/verification. In addition, it also takes care of verifying trust in an X.509 certificate used to sign some portion of the message. WSS4J currently ships with three Crypto implementations:

• Merlin: The standard implementation, based around two JDK keystores for key/cert retrieval, and trust verification.
• CertificateStore: Holds an array of X509 Certificates. Can only be used for encryption and signature verification.
• MerlinDevice: Based on Merlin, allows loading of keystores using a null InputStream - for example on a smart-card device.

The next release(s) of WSS4J, 2.0.5 and 2.1.2, will contain a fourth implementation:

• MerlinAKI: A new Merlin-based Crypto implementation that searches the truststore for the issuing certificate using the AuthorityKeyIdentifier extension bytes of the signing certificate, as opposed to the issuer DN.

Trust verification for the standard/default Merlin implementation works as follows:

1. Is the signing cert contained in the keystore/truststore? If yes, then trust verification succeeds. This can be combined with using regular expressions on the Subject DN as well.
2. If not, then get the issuing cert by reading the Issuer DN from the signing cert. Then search for this cert in the keystore/truststore. 
3. If the issuer cert is found, then form a cert path containing the signing cert, the issuing cert and any subsequent issuing cert of that cert. Then validate the cert path.

However, the retrieval of the issuing cert in step 2 above falls down under certain rare scenarios, where there may not be a 1-to-1 link between the Subject DN of a certificate and a public key. This is where the new MerlinAKI implementation comes in. Instead of searching for the issuing cert using the issuer DN of the signing cert, it instead uses BouncyCastle to retrieve the AuthorityKeyIdentifier extension bytes (if present) from the cert. It then searches for the issuing cert by seeing which of the certs in the truststore contain a SubjectKeyIdentifier extension with a matching identifier value. You can switch to use MerlinAKI simply by changing the name of the Crypto provider in the Crypto properties file: