Importing the private-key/public-certificate pair in the Java KeyStore

I used the following steps to create a new Java keystore with a pair of private/public key to be used by a Java (internal) server with TLS. Please notice that the certificate is selfsigned:

1. Generate key with AES256

   openssl genrsa -aes256 -out server.key 1024

2. Generate cert request for CA

   openssl req -x509 -sha256 -new -key server.key -out server.csr

3. Generate self signed expiry-time 10 years

   openssl x509 -sha256 -days 3652 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out selfsigned.crt

4. Use a program like KeyStoreExplorer to import the pair (private key and selfsigned certificate) in a new JKS

This works but I'd like to implement the last step without using a GUI.

I know how to import the self signed certificate only:

// create the keystore and import the public key. THIS WILL NOT IMPORT THE PRIVATE KEY SO THE KEYSTORE CAN'T BE USED ON THE SERVER TO MAKE THE TLS CONNECTION
/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_45/bin/keytool -import -alias myservercert -file server.crt -keystore mykeystore.jks

So the question is: how can I create a Java KeyStore and import both the certificate with the public key and the private key without using a GUI?

With your private key and public certificate, you need to create a PKCS12 keystore first, then convert it into a JKS.

# Create PKCS12 keystore from private key and public certificate.
openssl pkcs12 -export -name myservercert -in selfsigned.crt -inkey server.key -out keystore.p12

# Convert PKCS12 keystore into a JKS keystore
keytool -importkeystore -destkeystore mykeystore.jks -srckeystore keystore.p12 -srcstoretype pkcs12 -alias myservercert

To verify the contents of the JKS, you can use this command:

keytool -list -v -keystore mykeystore.jks

If this was not a self-signed certificate, you would probably want to follow this step with importing the certificate chain leading up to the trusted CA cert.

A keystore needs a keystore file. The KeyStore class needs a FileInputStream. But if you supply null (instead of FileInputStream instance) an empty keystore will be loaded. Once you create a keystore, you can verify its integrity using keytool.

Following code creates an empty keystore with empty password

> KeyStore ks2 = KeyStore.getInstance("jks"); > ks2.load(null,"".toCharArray()); > FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream("C:\mykeytore.keystore"); > ks2.store(out, "".toCharArray());

Once you have the keystore, importing certificate is very easy. Checkout this link for the sample code.