The goal is to ask any clients to provide a client certificate and achieve mutual authentication between the client and the server.

I have created a certification authority (CA) to sign the client and server certificates.

I have imported the server certificate into the keystore and added an HTTPS connector to the standalone.xml configuration file to serve HTTPS requests on the 8443 port.

I have imported the CA root certificate into the Certificate Manager under Authorities in client's Firefox.

Everything works fine and when I request https://localhost:8443 I get a page with a valid server certificate.

The problem is, when I import the client certificate into the Certificate Manager in Firefox and set the server configuration to verify client certificates (verify-client="true" in standalone.xml) I get a browser error:

Secure Connection Failed:
An error occurred during a connection to localhost:8443.
SSL peer cannot verify your certificate.
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_alert)
while the jboss log on the server states:

11:01:31,142 DEBUG [org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint] (http-localhost-127.0.0.1-8443-1) Handshake failed: java.io.IOException: SSL handshake failed. Ciper suite in SSL Session is SSL_NULL_WITH_NULL_NULL
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.jsse.JSSESocketFactory.handshake(JSSESocketFactory.java:191) [jbossweb-7.0.1.Final.jar:7.0.2.Final]
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint.setSocketOptions(JIoEndpoint.java:1144) [jbossweb-7.0.1.Final.jar:7.0.2.Final]
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$Worker.run(JIoEndpoint.java:952) [jbossweb-7.0.1.Final.jar:7.0.2.Final]
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662) [:1.6.0_30]

To be sure it is a bug, I downgraded to the jboss-6.1.0.Final where everything works fine as expected, i.e. it is a only 7.0.2 version issue. I'm not sure about 7.1.x, since I haven't had the chance to try it yet.

Btw, I followed this tutorial to get the PKI ready: http://virgo47.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/tomcat-web-application-with-ssl-client-certificates/