The Initium X.509 Certificate Wizard.
Douglas A. Lyon · The Journal of Object Technology · 2004
This paper describes the use of the Thawte's "Web of Trust" X.509 certificates for signing and distributing executable Jar resources.A keytool wizard (called the Initium X.509 Certificate Wizard) was developed in order to help with the importation and management of certificates.A signed Jar file generally indicates that the signer authorizes the contents.Signing is accomplished using a certificate that has been issued by a Certificate Authority (CA).Several CA's are available for this task; however, few of them are free, like the Thawte CA.Once a free certificate is obtained, Jar files may be distributed and named as verified from the signer.Trusted Jar files can be run outside of the "sandbox" and thus be given improved access to the target system.The impact of having a trusted Jar file is that Jar distribution systems (like Java Web Start, or Browser-based Applets) can run the program in the trusted manner.Therefore, such trusted programs can have access to the files, or be able to open connections to hosts other than the web host.The keytool wizard addresses a subproblem of the Initium project, a joint, on-going project between the Fairfield University and DocJava, Inc. Initium is a Latin word that means: "at the start".