The texts of the above programs are at http://www.dur.ac.uk/barry.cornelius/papers/Signed/Ages/.

JDK 1.1.x's appletviewer must be used instead of a browser such as Netscape Navigator. This is because JDK 1.1.x's certificates are X509v1 certificates for DSA whereas Netscape's Navigator uses X509v3. However, Sun has said that the next release of the JDK will be able to read X509v3 certificates, and hopefully ‘it will be a straightforward matter for the Java-enabled browsers to use the JDK certificate APIs to import and parse the JDK signing certificates’. In the next release, Sun will replace the javakey tool by keytool, jarsigner and policytool, and the security database used by these new tools will be incompatible with the database in the identitydb.obj file. Although these changes may take place in JDK 1.1.6 (possibly due in December 1997), they are more likely to occur in JDK 1.2 (possibly due in Q2 1998).

Sun has one page about security at http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.1/docs/guide/security/. However, their main security page is at http://java.sun.com/security/. There is a guide to using javakey at http://java.sun.com/security/usingJavakey.html and recommendations on its use at http://java.sun.com/security/policy.html. The details about the replacement of javakey by keytool, jarsigner and policytool is given at http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/docs/guide/security/.

There is a section about keys, certificates and digital signatures in Sun's Tutorial on Java: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/security1.1/.

Netscape's WWW page for signed objects is at http://developer.netscape.com/library/documentation/signedobj/.