What is Keytool?

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 keytool is a key and certificate management utility. It allows users to administer their own public/private key pairs and associated certificates for use in self-authentication (where the user authenticates himself/herself to other users/services) or data integrity and authentication services, using digital signatures

Java includes the keytool utility in its releases. We use it to manage keys and certificates and store them in a keystore. The keytool command allows us to create self-signed certificates and show information about the keystore.

In the following sections, we're going to go through different functionalities of this utility.

First of all, let's create a self-signed certificate that could be used to establish secure communication between projects in our development environment, for example.

In order to generate the certificate, we're going to open a command-line prompt and use keytool command with the -genkeypair option

keytool -genkeypair -alias <alias> -keypass <keypass> -validity <validity> -storepass <storepass>

Let's learn more about each of these parameters:

  • alias – the name for our certificate
  • keypass – the password of the certificate. We'll need this password to have access to the private key of our certificate
  • validity – the time (in days) of the validity of our certificate
  • storepass – the password for the keystore. This will be the password of the keystore if the store doesn't exist

For example, let's generate a certificate named “cert1” that has a private key of “pass123” and is valid for one year. We'll also specify “stpass123” as the keystore password:

keytool -genkeypair -alias cert1 -keypass pass123 -validity 365 -storepass stpass123

After executing the command, it'll ask for some information that we'll need to provide:

What is your first and last name?
  [Unknown]:  Name
What is the name of your organizational unit?
  [Unknown]:  Unit
What is the name of your organization?
  [Unknown]:  Company
What is the name of your City or Locality?
  [Unknown]:  City
What is the name of your State or Province?
  [Unknown]:  State
What is the two-letter country code for this unit?
  [Unknown]:  US
Is CN=Name, OU=Unit, O=Company, L=City, ST=State, C=US correct?
  [no]:  yes

As mentioned, if we haven't created the keystore before, creating this certificate will create it automatically.

We could also execute the -genkeypair option without parameters. If we don't provide them in the command line and they're mandatory, we'll be prompted for them


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