The private constructor X509Certificate._() creates an object with an uninitialized native field, and the member functions of that object dereference that field. This is safe because the only function that calls that constructor also initializes the native field. Even if we initialized it to NULL in the constructor, the methods will still have a null dereference. We could check the field against NULL in every method , and throw an exception, but this should never happen. The only way it could happen is for someone to use mirrors to access the private constructor, and make the object.

To avoid a security problem, we can initialize the field to NULL, but this requires a new native function.

@kustermann @sgjesse @whesse