The JCA and the JCE
The basic functionality for using cryptographic techniques in Java is provided by the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) and its sibling, the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE). In this chapter, you will look at how the architecture works, as well as why the architecture is the way it is. You will look at the policy files associated with the JCA and JCE, how signing of cryptographic services providers works, and how the JCA and JCE decide which provider to use if an algorithm you have requested is implemented by more than one. Finally, you will see how to install a provider either statically in the Java runtime or dynamically when an application starts up.
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A Java implemented key collision attack on the Data Encryption Standard (DES)
A Java implementation of a key collision attack on DES suggested by Eli Biham, [1], is discussed. Storage space minimization and fast searching techniques to speed up the attack are described. We also demonstrate the suitability of Java for large data cryptographic attacks and illustrate the extensive cryptographic features of the language.
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The Laws of Cryptography with Java Code
There are excellent technical treatises on cryptography, along with a number of popular books. In this book I am trying to find a middle ground, a “gentle” introduction to selected topics in cryptography without avoiding the mathematics. The material is aimed at undergraduate computer science students, but I hope it will be accessible and of interest to many others. The idea is to cover a limited number of topics carefully, with clear explanations, sample calculations, and illustrative Java implementations.
The emphasis is on the underlying systems and their theory, rather than on details of the use of systems already implemented. For example, the notes present material on the RSA cryptosystem, its theory and a Java implementation, but there is no discussion of a commercial implementation such as PGP (”Pretty Good Privacy”).
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VIAs New JAVA Cryptography Service Provider (VIA JCP) Implementation
With the release of the VIA JAVA Cryptography Service Provider (VIA JCP), JAVA applications can now take full advantage of the cryptographic hardware integrated into all recent x86 VIA microprocessors known as the VIA PadLock Security Engine. This initial release of the VIA JCP exposes the full functionality of the VIA PadLock Security Engine feature set that includes hardware random number generators (RNG) and an AES encryption engine.1 Moreover, because of the design of JAVA’s cryptography architecture, the benefits of the hardware based security integrated into VIA processors are available to any piece of JAVA software, whether or not it was developed with the VIA hardware in mind.
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Java Cryptography on KVM and its Performance and Security Optimization using HW/SW Co-design Techniques
This paper describes a design approach to include and optimize Java based cryptographic applications into resource limited embedded devices. For easy prototyping and to be platform independent, the security applications are first developed in Java. Two Java cryptographic libraries, the Bouncy Castle API and the IAIK API are ported to a real embedded device for cost and performance evaluation. It requires 0.88Mbytes to 1.2Mbytes in the KVM footprint size and a few milliseconds to run secret key algorithms and message digests on a typical embedded device.
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