Thanks for the acticle Ulf. I configure my Tomcat5.5.25 as mentioned in the artcile and make a web service call from a client as follow: System.setProperty( "javax.net.ssl.trustStore", "C:/keystore_certs/client.keystore"); System.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword", "changeit"); AuthenticationServiceStub stub = new AuthenticationServiceStub(https://localhost:8443/mytest/services/LoginService); // initialize data here // web service call stub.login(doc); When I made this call I get the following exception: .apache.axis2.AxisFault: java.lang.NullPointerException at org.apache.axis2.util.Utils.getInboundFaultFromMessageContext(Utils.java:486) at org.apache.axis2.description.OutInAxisOperationClient.handleResponse(OutInAxisOperation.java:343) at ...