Author: Real Gagnon
Author's WebSite: http://tactika.com/realhome/realhome.html

This article is specific to Netscape Navigator 4.x.

You need to obtain a certificate from a trusted source.

A Certificate for developer can be purchased for about $200 (with $100/year to renew it), see Thawte certification and VeriSign for example. For non US citizen, it can be difficult to obtain a certificate from US based trusted source, because of the exportation limitation imposed on encryption technique. Certificates used to sign email are not secured enough to sign applets, they are CLASS 1 certificate, you need something like CLASS 3 to be able to sign an applet.

Signing an Applet means signing the JAR containing the Applet. To sign a JAR, you need tools provided by Netscape. Zigbert is a command-line utility. Also a GUI JAR packager can be used to sign JARS.

Sun's JAVAKEY utility can't be used to produce/sign certificate/JAR compatible for the Netscape security manager. Read the Netscape's security FAQ or Netscape's Object Signing Resources for more informations.

Once the Applet signed, we must use the netscape.security (also called Capabilities) package to grant/remove privileges. This package is included with Netscape v4 or can be downloaded from the Netscape Web site.

When compiling a JAVA source containing references to the Capabilities class, we must adjust to

CLASSPATH to include the JAR java40.jar (with v4). 

 set CLASSPATH=

    .;c:\windev\jdk1.1.3\lib\classes.zip;

        c:\Program Files\Netscape\Communicator\Program\Java\Classes\java40.jar;

Posted On: 5-Jul-1999

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