Java Security, 2nd Edition

Keys, Certificates, and Object Serialization

Before we conclude this chapter, a brief word on object serialization, keys, and certificates. Keys and certificates are often transmitted electronically, and a reasonable mechanism for transmitting them between Java programs is to send them as serialized objects. In theory -- and, most of the time, in practice -- this is a workable solution. If you modify some of the examples in this chapter to save and restore serialized keys or certificates, that will certainly work in a testing environment.

A problem arises, however, when you send these serialized objects between virtual machines that have two different security providers. Let’s take the case of a DSA public key. When you create such a key with the Sun security provider, you get an instance of the sun.security.provider.DSAPublicKey class. When you create such a key with a third-party security provider, you may get an instance of the com.xyz.XYZPublicKey class. Although both public keys are extensions of the PublicKey class, they cannot be interchanged by object serialization. Serializing a public key created with the Sun security provider requires that the sun.security.provider.DSAPublicKey class be used, and deserialization creates an object of that type, no matter what security providers the deserializing virtual machine has installed. Whether or not the Sun security provider has been installed in the destination virtual machine is irrelevant. The process of deserializing the ...