EJBCA

Enterprise Java Beans Certificate Authority, or EJBCA, is a free software public key infrastructure (PKI) certificate authority software package maintained and sponsored by the Swedish for-profit company PrimeKey Solutions AB, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. The project's source code is available under terms of the Lesser GNU General Public License.

Design

The system is implemented in Java EE and designed to be platform independent and fully clusterable,^[1] to permit a greater degree of scalability than is typical of similar software packages. Multiple instances of EJBCA are run simultaneously, sharing a database containing the current certificate authorities (CAs). This permits each instance of the software to access any CA. The software also supports the use of a Hardware Security Module (HSM), which provides additional security. Larger-scale installations would use multiple instances of EJBCA running on a cluster, a fully distributed database on a separate cluster and a third cluster with HSMs keeping the different CA keys.

EJBCA supports many common PKI Architectures such as all in a single server, distributed RAs and external validation authority. An example architecture is illustrated below.

References

Further reading

• Research and application of EJBCA based on J2EE; Liyi Zhang, Qihua Liu and Min Xu; IFIP International Federation for Information Processing Volume 251/2008; ISBN 978-0-387-75465-9
• Chapter "Securing Connections and Remote Administration" in Hardening Linux; James Turnbull; ISBN 978-1-59059-444-5
• Exception-Handling Bugs in Java and a Language Extension to Avoid Them; Westley Weimer; Advanced Topics in Exception Handling Techniques Volume 4119/2006; ISBN 978-3-540-37443-5
• A workflow based architecture for Public Key Infrastructure; Johan Eklund; TRITA-CSC-E 2010:047

External links

• EJBCA Homepage
• EJBCA at SourceForge