I’m trying to establish an encrypted connection to my self-operated e-mail server. For this, I need to get the root certificate of the CA (CAcert) which certified my server’s public key installed on my mobile phone (a SonyEricsson V630i, remember?).

However, regardless what I try, the mobile doesn’t accept the certificate.

This is what I tried so far:

• Send the DER-encoded certificate to the phone using OBEX-push.
• Download it to my phone from my web-server, using one of the following MIME types:
  • application/x-x509-ca-cert
  • application/vnd.wap.wtls-ca-certificate
  • application/vnd.wap.hashed-certificate

The mobile seems to recognize the file as a certificate (because it’s neither dumping it on the screen as if it was a text file, nor is it actively rejecting it with a message like “unknown file type,”) but it seems to refuse to install it.

Obviously the V630i behaves different than the K700i, because on this page someone states that he got the cert installed by simply OBEX-pushing it onto his phone.

BTW, this annoyance is not a problem pertaining to the Vodafone-branded firmware. Even with the “vanilla,” retail firmware I couldn’t import the cert.

So what is SonyEricsson trying to accomplish by preventing us to use our own certificates? Are they trying to force us to buy certificates from one of the big players (you know who I’m referring to)? Because they are supposedly “safer” than the “el-cheapo” certificates from CAcert?!

Hah! I still remember there have been several scandals with the established certification “authorities” one of which erroneously issued “microsoft.com” certificates to someone not affiliated with Microsoft in any way, etc.

So is this where we pay a hell of money for???

BTW, I had a “nice” e-mail conversation with the German SonyEricsson support. The lady tried to educate me, but obviously didn’t know what she was talking about. She wildly threw in some technical terms, only to have them rebutted by me because they were simply wrong in that context. Finally she gave up and told me the following:

Your inquiry is too specific for our support, so please ask for help on SonyEricsson’s DeveloperWorld.

Great! Thanks for wasting my time. 🙁