Invoking secure services inside bpel with x509 certificate and weblogic

Question

Hi, everyone. Here we have a problem with invoking secure webservices (*client authentication*) from a bpel deployed in weblogic that is consuming so much time (more than a week) and don't know what else to try.
The scenario: we have a bpel process which invokes a series of web services without any security mechanisms. Now, we have to change it to invoke a series of webservices that do exactly the same, but using ssl and client authentication with x509 certificates. The first part of it, the ssl one, is done without any problems. But the second part is not working at all, and we (I) are running out of ideas how to configure it in weblogic.
The situation: I want to invoke a webservice, say, Service1. It requires client authentication, so I should pass a certificate (*which I already have*). I put that certificate inside a keystore (with keytool -importkeystore, from p12 to jks). With SoapUI I have no problem now to invoke the service now. But, I'm not sure what should I do to make it work in weblogic; after all, the provider keeps answering with a HTTP 403 Forbidden error.
The actions: inside the weblogic's enterprise manager, in SOA deployments (SOA / soa-infra / default ) I selected my composite, and in the Dashboard (down at Services and references), clicked the particular service (Service1). Then, it took me to another page where I can see statistics about that service, and a tab named Policies. There (in Policies) I have the chance to attach a policy, but I don't know which one is the approppriate; I guest it should be WSS11_x509_token_with_message_protection_service_policy, which in turn asks me to provide a value for keystore.recipient.alias, keystore.sig.csf.key and keystore.enc.csf.key. For this keys, I provide values that I configured in Credentials (Weblogic Domain / Security / Credentials, subtree oracle.wsm.security). My own logic tells me that what I have done is what I should have done, but still no luck :(
I am sure the keystore is ok (if I rename the keystore file it tells me that the keystore file cannot be found, and if I specify an alias which is not inside the keystore it tells me that the alias is not found and list me valid aliases). I guess I am missing something, somewhere, but after many hours (days, almost 2 weeks) googling, still cannot make it work.
Any ideas would be apreciated. If anyone knows about a post or article about this, it would be apreciated too, but I can tell is not that I just googled for 25 minutes, but I have spent more than a week googling, trying, analyzing and reading formal documentation, with no results.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Try to enable SSL and WS debugging on your WLS. Add the following to your startup script:
-Dweblogic.webservice.verbose=true
-Dssl.debug=true
..then you might be able to spot if the rejection is based on some handshake problem.