EJBCA
| Developer(s) | PrimeKey Solutions AB |
|---|---|
| Initial release | December 5, 2001 |
| Stable release | 3.7.1
/ September 16, 2008 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | Java, J2EE |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish |
| Type | PKI Software |
| License | LGPL |
| Website | www.ejbca.org |
Enterprise Java Bean Certificate Authority, or EJBCA, is an Open source PKI Certificate Authority software package.
EJBCA is 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 Enterprise Java and designed to be platform independent and fully clusterable[1], which permits 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.
Features
EJBCA follows all the major standards in the PKI area like X509, OCSP, CMP, XKMS, SCEP, Elliptic curves and more [2], including the new Country Verifying Certificate (CVC) EU standard for machine readable passports that will be mandatory from 2009-06-26.
Development
The EJBCA sourcecode comes with project files for the Eclipse IDE. Concurrent Version System control has been dropped in order to make way for Sub-version Software. As an Open Source project, EJBCA the standard GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), which is an Open Source Initiative approved license. The source code is hosted at SourceForge.net. One of the most important aspects for developers is backward compatibility[3], since EJBCA is an infrastructure component. A list of all of contributors can be found here.
Known installations
There are many known[4] installations all over the world, among them:
- Ministry of Defence, France, 1 000 users
- Ministry of Finances, France, 40 000 users
- National Swedish Police Board, Sweden, 25 000 users
- ZhuHai Local Taxation Bureau, China, 50 000 users
- Grupo Safa, Spain, 20 000 users
- Seraza.com, Brazil, 20 000 users
- Autoritat de Certificació de la Comunitat Valenciana, Spain, 75 000 + users
References
External links
- EJBCA at SourceForge
- EJBCA evaluation report from University of Queensland, AU
- Finding and Preventing Run-Time Error Handling Mistakes; Westley Weimer, George C. Necula; University of California, Berkeley
- Migration guide from OpenSSL CAs
- Migration guide from MS CAs
- EJBCA at java-source.net
- EJBCA is used a component in Chillout
- Debian package maintainer
- Information about EJBCA in French
- EJBCA proposed as a solution for How to Overcome the Challenges to Large Scale Adoption of Open Source Software and Systems in Pakistan Business and Industrial Environment; Athar Mahboob and Nassar Ikram; National University of Sciences & Technology, Karachi
EJBCA in literature
- 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