X.509 Certificates

X.509 Certificates

The package ice.cert contains classes for handling X.509 digital certificates, private keys, distinguished names, and other types needed for certificate handling. The factory method X509CertificateFactory contains methods for parsing certificates in DER-encoded files or from byte arrays.

The class ice.cert.X509Certificate( ) represents a single certificate. The class has the same methods as java.security.cert.X509Certificate( ), but it does not subclass it in order to make it possible to use the class on JDK 1.1. The class contains methods for extracting the different fields of the certificate, like expiry date, issuer and subject names, methods to check the validity of the certificate, and a method to save the certificate as DER or PEM format. See the API documentation for details.

The class X500Name contains a single distinguished name, as used in the subject and issuer fields in the certificates.