The CertificateFactory Class

The CertificateFactory class is an engine class that defines the functionality of a certificate factory, which is used to generate certificate and certificate revocation list (CRL) objects from their encodings.

A certificate factory for X.509 must return certificates that are an instance of java.security.cert.X509Certificate, and CRLs that are an instance of java.security.cert.X509CRL.

Creating a CertificateFactory Object

As with all engine classes, the way to get a CertificateFactory object for a particular certificate or CRL type is to call the getInstance static factory method on the CertificateFactory class:

static CertificateFactory getInstance(String type)

Note: The type name is not case-sensitive.

A caller can optionally specify the name of a provider or the Provider class, which will guarantee that the implementation of the certificate factory requested is from the named provider.

static CertificateFactory getInstance(String type, String provider)
static CertificateFactory getInstance(String type, Provider provider)

Generating Certificate Objects

To generate a certificate object and initialize it with the data read from an input stream, use the generateCertificate method:

final Certificate generateCertificate(InputStream inStream)

To return a (possibly empty) collection view of the certificates read from a given input stream, use the generateCertificates method:

final Collection generateCertificates(InputStream inStream)

Generating CRL Objects

To generate a certificate revocation list (CRL) object and initialize it with the data read from an input stream, use the generateCRL method:

final CRL generateCRL(InputStream inStream)

To return a (possibly empty) collection view of the CRLs read from a given input stream, use the generateCRLs method:

final Collection generateCRLs(InputStream inStream)

Generating CertPath Objects

To generate a CertPath object and initialize it with data read from an input stream, use one of the following generateCertPath methods (with or without specifying the encoding to be used for the data):

final CertPath generateCertPath(InputStream inStream)
final CertPath generateCertPath(InputStream inStream, String encoding)

To generate a CertPath object and initialize it with a list of certificates, use the following method:

final CertPath generateCertPath(List certificates)

To retrieve a list of the CertPath encodings supported by this certificate factory, you can call the getCertPathEncodings method:

final Iterator getCertPathEncodings()

The default encoding will be listed first.