Just use one of the following protocol prefixes.

At this time, the latter will only work for clients running with Java 1.4.

If the server you wish to connect to is using a certificate approved by your default trust keystores, then there is nothing else to do. If not, then you need to tell Java to "trust" the server cert. (It's a slight over-simplification to say that if the server certificate was purchased, then you are all set; if somebody "signed their own" certificate by self-signing or using a private ca certificate, then you need to set up trust).

First, you need to obtain the cert (only the "public" part of it). Since this cert is passed to all clients, you could obtain it by writing a java client that dumps it to file, or perhaps by using openssl s_client. Since in most cases, if you want to trust a non-commercial cert, you probably have access to the server keystore, I'll show an example of how to get what you need from the server-side JKS keystore.

You may already have an X509 cert for your server. If you have a server keystore, then you can generate a X590 cert like this.

    keytool -export -keystore server.store -alias existing_alias -file server.cer

Now, you need to add this cert to one of the system trust keystores or to a keystore of your own. See the Customizing Stores section in JSSERefGuide.html to see where your system trust keystores are. You can put private keystores anywhere you want to. The following command will add the cert to an existing keystore, or create a new keystore if client.store doesn't exist.

    keytool -import -trustcacerts -keystore trust.store -alias new_alias -file server.cer

If you are making a new keystore, you probably want to start with a copy of your system default keystore which you can find somewhere under your JAVA_HOME directory (typically jre/lib/security/cacerts for a JDK, but I forget exactly where it is for a JRE).

Unless your OS can't stop other people from writing to your files, you probably do not want to set a password on the trust keystore.

If you added the cert to a system trust store, then you are finished. Otherwise you will need to specify your custom trust keystore to your client program. The generic way to set the trust keystore is to set the sytem property javax.net.ssl.trustStore every time that you run your client program. For example

    java -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=/home/blaine/trust.store -jar /path/to/hsqldb.jar dest-urlid

N.b. The hostname in your database URL must match the Common Name of the server's certificate exactly. That means that if a site certificate is admc.com, you can not use jdbc:hsqldb:hsqls://localhost or jdbc:hsqldb:hsqls://www.admc.com:1100 to connect to it.

If you want more details on anything, see JSSERefGuide.html on Sun's site, or in the subdirectory docs/guide/security/jsse of your Java SE docs.

Get yourself a JKS keystore containing a private key. Then set the system property javax.net.ssl.keyStore to the path to that file, and javax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword to the password of the keystore (and to the private key-- they have to be the same).

    java -Djavax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword=secret -Djavax.net.ssl.keyStore=/usr/hsqldb/db/db3/server.store  \
        -cp /path/to/hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.Server

(This is a single command that I have broken into 2 lines using my shell's \ line-continuation feature. In this example, I'm using a server.properties file so that I don't need to give arguments to specify database instances or the server endpoint).

If there is any user demand, we will have a more secure way to supply the password before long.

I'm not going to tell you how to get a CA-signed SSL certificate. That is well documented at many other places.

Assuming that you have a standard pem-style private key certificate, here's how you can use openssl and the program DERImport to get it into a JKS keystore.

Because I have spent a lot of time on this document already, I am just giving you an example.

    openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -outform DER -in Xpvk.pem -inform PEM -out Xpvk.pk8 -nocrypt

    openssl x509 -in Xcert.pem -out Xcert.der -outform DER

    java DERImport new.keystore NEWALIAS Xpvk.pk8 Xcert.der

You need the program DERImport.class of course. Do some internet searches to find DERImport.java or DERImport.class and download it.

If DERImport has become difficult to obtain, I can write a program to do the same thing-- just let me know.

Run man keytool or see the Creating a Keystore section of JSSERefGuide.html.