smart Card tutorial : Part 1

When your application handles or performs sensitive data or operations, security becomes a major concern, which is why some companies decides to use Strong Authentication for their applications, also known as 'two factors authentication' : one thing that you have (the smart Card, or USB token), and one that you know (the PIN or password).

This article will be the start of a series of tutorials about smart cards (USB Tokens are readerless smartcards, so the same applies) : how to access, manage, generate keys etc... at the end of the articles, tou should be able to write smart-card-based applications for authentication, digital signatures and PIN/PUK management.

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EJBCA : a Step By Step install Guide

As mentionned in my previous Article Presenting EJBCA, this article will explain how to have an In-House Certificate Authority up and running using EJBCA.

EJBCA needs a couple of componenets to be installed in order for it to work, we will be using :

• EJBCA 3.9.5
• Mysql Server 5
• Apache Ant 1.7
• OpenJDK 6 JDK
• JCE (Java Cryptographique Extension) 6
• JBoss Application Server 4.4
• MySQL Java Connector 5

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Presenting EJBCA

Your enterprise decided recently to start using digital Certificates for authentication, digital signatures, Server authentication etc... in other words, you need a Certificate Authority(CA) in order to deliver certificates for your servers and users.

Of course, you can choose to buy certificates from known vendors like VerSign,Thawte etc... but you will need to pay for every certificate a user or a server needs! a better approach would be hosting you own In-House certificate Authority, this way you can issue as many certificates as you need.
Now that you decided to host your own CA,have your own Public Key Infrastructure (PKI),

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