JXTA in a Nutshell

User Credentials

In Chapter 2, we introduced the JTXA configurator and noted that it creates a pse directory that contains user configuration information. Let’s look at that directory in a little more detail.

The pse directory contains four files:

pse/client/peer-service.pem

This file contains the X.509 certificate that the peer will use when it connects to an existing secure pipe. This certificate is issued by the root certificate.

pse/client/peer.phrase

This file contains the encrypted password the user entered into the configurator.

pse/etc/passwd

This file contains the encrypted username and password.

pse/root/peer-root.pem

This file contains the X.509 certificate that the peer will use when it creates a secure pipe. It is also the root certificate of the client’s peer certificate.

Information in the pse directory is used only by the secure pipe implementation. In fact, only the secure pipe implementation has access to this information; the certificates, username, and password are not available to the rest of the application in any form (unless the application wants to read these files directly and determine how to extract the relevant information from them).

When you follow the examples earlier in this book, you are always prompted for a username and password (or you specify one via command-line properties). The platform will verify the validity of your password; if incorrect, you’ll get an IOException when creating a secure pipe.

The certificate files contain ...