Problem with validating SAML assertion signature ("bad" certificate?)

Question

Hi,
We've been developing and testing webservices and webservice clients under WebLogic for awhile. In our typical configuration, we have the SAML Credential mapper configured on the webservice client side, and the SAML Identity Asserter on the webservice side, and we are using "sender-vouches", whereby the SAML assertions are being signed by the SAML Credential mapper.
Up through development, for the signing, we've been using certs issued by a test CA that we have, but now, we are moving to a pre-production environment, and we're required to use certs issued by a specific 3rd party CA. Since we've started using those new certs, we have been getting "token failed to validate" errors. We've been trying to diagnose this problem for awhile, and we're at the point that we believe that, for some reason, the certs that we got that were issued by the 3rd party CA are "bad".
Specifically, those certs are SSL Server certs, with the following characteristics:
Usages:
Digital Signature
Key Encipherment
Key Agreement
Netscape Type: SSL Server Authentication
but, they also have two "extended usage extension" OIDs, both are "2.16.840.1.101.2.x.yy.zz".
When we looked at the certs using various tools, e.g., "openssl x509...", etc., those extended usage extensions are being displayed as "unknown", which made us a littel suspicious about them, so I setup a simple test configuration with two WebLogic 10.0 MP1 instances.
For testing, we first used a cert from the 3rd party CA, which gave us the "failed to validate token" errors.
During this testing, we put a sniffer on the line, and captured the SOAP message with the signed SAML assertion, and we used a small Java app that I wrote awhile ago that will validate a digital signature. When we ran that Java app, the digital signature validated successfully (i.e., the digital signature was GOOD).
This seems to imply that the "failed to validate token signature" errors are happening because of something other than the digital signature being incorrect.
So, then, we created a certificate that matches the 3rd party CA certs almost exactly, except that we did not include the two extended usage extensions, and we configured the two WebLogic instances to use this new certificate.
When we tested with the new certificate, we no longer got the errors.
So, it appears that when the cert has those two enhanced usage extensions, WebLogic is either not willing to, or not able to, utilize the certs for validating digital signatures.
Does anyone have any insight into this problem, or has anyone encountered a problem like this before?
I also was wondering if there are any parameters for WebLogic that we might try to set that would tell WebLogic to perhaps ignore the certificate extensions and to just do the digital signature validation?
Thanks,
Jim

Answer 1

Hi,
FYI, we were able to resolve this problem today. It turned out to be that the certificate and key were not "matched".
The way that we figured this out was to use openssl and the procedure here:
http://kb.wisc.edu/middleware/page.php?id=4064
which showed the mismatch.
We've since generated a new cert request and got a new certificate, and it's working now.
Jim