How to automatically install self signed certificate in IE Trusted Root Certification Authorities store

Question

I created a self signed certificate but the browser tells me "This CA Root Certificate is not trusted. To enable trust, install this certificate in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store".

I did by going into IE --> Internet Options --> Content --> Certificates --> ect... I actually had to export the self signed certificate and then import it into the Trusted Root Certification. Only after the certificate was located under the ROOT store in the users machine that IE did not display any WARNINGS.

This will be deployed in a production environment, so having the users manually do the above steps is unacceptable.

How can I automatically do this? I just want them to accept and not have that "Certificate Error" and have the URL bar turned "RED" in IE.

I'm using Tomcat 5.5. I also followed the same steps as in the Tomcat SSL How To Tutorial http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/ssl-howto.html

Thanks in advance.

Solution 1

Java 6 provides a cryptographic provider named SunMSCAPI to access the windows cryptography libraries API. This provider implements a keystore "Windows-Root" containing all Trust Anchors certificates.

It is possible to insert a certificate in this keystore.

KeyStore root = KeyStore.getInstance("Windows-ROOT");
root.load(null);
/* certificate must be DER-encoded */
FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream("C:/path/to/root/cert/root.der");
X509Certificate cacert = (X509Certificate)CertificateFactory.getInstance("X.509").generateCertificate(in);
root.setCertificateEntry("CACert Root CA", cacert);

The user will be prompted if for confirmation. If the operation is canceled by the user then a KeyStoreException is thrown.

Some technotes about the provider can be found here: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/security/SunProviders.html#SunMSCAPI

Solution 2

Think about it. If this were possible, what would stop any fraudulent site from doing the same thing and making it look like their site was trusted? The whole point is that the user HAS to OK the certificate installation.

Solution 3

First of all, possibility to do this would compromise user's security, so it would be a security hole, so no, there's no easy way to do this.

Next, different software has different certificate stores. Microsoft and Chrome browser use CryptoAPI stores, Firefox has it's own store (Chrome can also use firefox's one AFAIK). Adobe's software has it's own store (in addition to CryptoAPI one).

Comments

[Marquinio]

Thats exactly what I want. The user will have to hit OK. But this did not place the certificate in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store. Instead I had to export/import the certificate. Is there a one click OK button that can perform all those steps for the user?

[Narayan Raman]

Note: This does not work in Java 64 bit versions less than JDK7 due to a bug in Java. Details: forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1526024