Nov 01, 2018 A private key can be use to sign a document and the public key is use to verify that the signature of the document is valid. The API we use to generate the key pairs is in the java.security package. That’s mean we have to import this package into our code. The class for generating the key pairs is KeyPairGenerator. Your key format is an unencrypted base64-encoded PKCS8-encoded private key. Here is an example of how to decode it into a private key. (Don't worry about the security of the private key in this example, it is just a throwaway for the example). Apr 23, 2012 To create a private/public key with the alias specified by the user, enter: keytool -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias -keystore keystore.jks -storepass -keypass is the user-chosen alias for the private and public keys that will function as a user name for logging in using RSA. The command generates a public/private key pair for the entity whose distinguished name has a common name of Susan Jones and the organizational unit of Purchasing. The command creates a self-signed certificate that includes the public key and the distinguished-name information. How to Create SHA256 RSA Signature Using Java. The hash is then encrypted with a private key using the RSA algorithm. This is useful in scenarios where we only need to verify that the data is not tampered and is authentic. For example, SHA256 with RSA is used to generate the signature part of the Google cloud storage signed URLs.
Contents
- 3. Saving the Keys in Binary Format
- Source Code
1. Introduction
Let us learn the basics of generating and using RSA keys in Java.
Java provides classes for the generation of RSA public and private key pairs with the package java.security. You can use RSA keys pairs in public key cryptography.
Public key cryptography uses a pair of keys for encryption. Distribute the public key to whoever needs it but safely secure the private key.
Public key cryptography can be used in two modes:
Encryption: Only the private key can decrypt the data encrypted with the public key.
Authentication: Data encrypted with the private key can only be decrypted with the public key thus proving who the data came from.
2. Generating a Key Pair
First step in creating an RSA Key Pair is to create a KeyPairGeneratorfrom a factory method by specifying the algorithm (“
RSA
” in this instance):Initialize the KeyPairGenerator with the key size. Use a key size of 1024 or 2048. Currently recommended key size for SSL certificates used in e-commerce is 2048 so that is what we use here.
Generate Ssh Public Key From Private Key
From the KeyPair object, get the public key using getPublic() and the private key using getPrivate().
3. Saving the Keys in Binary Format
Save the keys to hard disk once they are obtained. This allows re-using the keys for encryption, decryption and authentication.
What is the format of the saved files? The key information is encoded in different formats for different types of keys. Here is how you can find what format the key was saved in. On my machine, the private key was saved in
PKCS#8
format and the public key in X.509
format. We need this information below to load the keys.3.1. Load Private Key from File
After saving the private key to a file (or a database), you might need to load it at a later time. You can do that using the following code. Note that you need to know what format the data was saved in: PKCS#8 in our case.
3.2 Load Public Key from File
Load the public key from a file as follows. The public key has been saved in X.509 format so we use the X509EncodedKeySpec class to convert it.
4. Use Base64 for Saving Keys as Text
Save the keys in text format by encoding the data in Base64. Java 8 provides a Base64 class which can be used for the purpose. Save the private key with a comment as follows:
And the public key too (with a comment):
5. Generating a Digital Signature
As mentioned above, one of the purposes of public key cryptography is digital signature i.e. you generate a digital signature from a file contents, sign it with your private key and send the signature along with the file. The recipient can then use your public key to verify that the signature matches the file contents.
Here is how you can do it. Use the signature algorithm “
SHA256withRSA
” which is guaranteed to be supported on all JVMs. Use the private key (either generated or load from file as shown above) to initialize the Signatureobject for signing. It is then updated with contents from the data file and the signature is generated and written to the output file. This output file contains the digital signature and must be sent to the recipient for verification.6. Verifying the Digital Signature
The recipient uses the digital signature sent with a data file to verify that the data file has not been tampered with. It requires access to the sender’s public key and can be loaded from a file if necessary as presented above.
The code below updates the Signature object with data from the data file. It then loads the signature from file and uses Signature.verify() to check if the signature is valid.
Generate Private Key From Public Key Java Download
And that in a nutshell is how you can use RSA public and private keys for digital signature and verification.
Source Code
How To Generate Private Key And Public Key In Java
Go here for the source code.