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Funny thing - is RSA banned by Sun?

2007, July 26 - 10:05 — müzso
I've just gone through the Java Cryptography Extension 1.2.2 API Specification & Reference document to read some examples on use of JCE. I want to use RSA encryption and in Java JCE is the way to go. However the JCE examples in the above doc do not even mention RSA! They tell about DES, DESede (Triple DES), Blowfish, but no word on RSA. This is quite strange, isn't it? Shocked

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2007, July 26 - 14:55 — airwin

I don't know the reasons but

I don't know the reasons but the RSA patent has expired on 21 September 2000 and the cited document was last modified 27 Juny 2000. Maybe a more up-to-date Java version has already RSA.

2007, July 26 - 15:12 — müzso

Re: I don't know the reasons but

That's true. I read articles on RSA encryption in Java and they said that I should use a custom security-provider (reason: the JRE builtin SunJCE provider supports only RSA message digests and not encryption). However I've found that the current SunJCE (in JDK 1.5) already supports all sorts of RSA encryption methods (with various block cipher modes and padding methods). So obviously only the documentation is outdated.

2007, July 27 - 18:31 — airwin

UltraSPARC T1

For the subject "Sun banning RSA" - Sun's latest CPU, the UltraSPARC T1 has built-in RSA cryptographic accelerator.

2007, July 27 - 19:00 — müzso

Re: UltraSPARC T1

That's nice and all, but you need proper software support for such goodies. Otherwise it's worth nothing. Eg. I had to face that while JDK1.5 already contains a JCE provider with support for RSA encryption (and not just digests as it was in previous JDKs), but the key size is limited to 2048 bits due to cryptographic export regulations of the USA. :->

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