Ade, Your ealier emali discussed the renegotiation challenge based on the Profiles. http://pki.fedoraproject.org/wiki/REST#Profiles For the case where a user points a browser (say and Ajax request) at /pki/profiles lets say that we have two cases: one where the user is authenticated and one where they are not. In both cases, they get back a collection, but in the case of unauthenticated it will have significantly fewer entries. In this case, we would want the Java equivalent of mod_nss: NSS_VerifyCLient: Optional I'm guessing this a tomcatjss setting. In this case, if the user has the certificate, they can present it, but if they don't, the operation will complete. I think this is what we want. We always ask for the certificate, but we say it is OK if you don't have it, you just don't get the data. In the case where the user is asking for an object, say an actual profile, and they don't have sufficient privs, they get back a hard and fast error: probably 403.2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_403 For something like CSRs, we probably want to restrict access to agents. In that case, if an unauthenticated user, or one without appropriate privs, attempts to access that URL, they also get a 403.2. I don't know how this works in with the renegotiate, but I am guessing that every time the user without a certificate hits an "Optional" page they will be asked for their cert. This might be chatty. No idea. So in general, we tag the URLS either NSS_VerifyClient: Require if they must be authenticated to use them NSS_VerifyClient: Optional if they see different results based on authentication or not NSS_VerifyClient: None if they can view them unauthenticated and see the same results as everyone else IN the pki/WEB-INF/web.xml, this probably maps to something like this: <security-constraint> <web-resource-collection> <web-resource-name>Protected Resource</web-resource-name> <url-pattern>*/*/profile*</url-pattern> </web-resource-collection> <auth-constraint> <role-name>*anonymous*</role-name> <role-name>*agent*</role-name> </auth-constraint> </security-constraint> I'm guessing that we want to specify a role for anonymous as opposed to no role. <web-app> ... <login-config> <auth-method>CLIENT-CERT</auth-method> <realm-name>Tomcat Manager Application</realm-name> <realm-name>PKICA</realm-name> </login-config> ... </web-app> the PKICA Realm would be defined at the server level, in conf/server.xml. Something like: <Realm className="com.netscape.catalina.realm.LDAPCertRealm" connectionURL="ldaps://localhost:8389" userPattern="uid={0},ou=people,dc=mycompany,dc=com" roleBase="ou=groups,dc=mycompany,dc=com" roleName="cn" roleSearch="(uniqueMember={0})" /> There is a class that almost does what we want. *org.apache.catalina.realm.JNDIRealm*. I suspect we can subclass it. It has two ways of doing the auth : Bind mode and Comparison mode. It might be possible to add a Client Cert mode in a subclass. docs are here: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/realm-howto.html#JNDIRealm