Verifying a signature in java using a certificates public key

Question

I'm looking to convert some C# code to the equivalent in Java.

The C# code takes some string content, and a signature (generated using the private key, on a seperate machine) and combined with the public key it verifies the signature matches, providing a level of assurance that the request has not been tampered with.

  public bool VerifySignature(string content, byte[] signatureBytes, AsymmetricAlgorithm publicKey)
  {
        var hash = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();

        byte[] dataBuffer = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(content);

        var cs = new CryptoStream(Stream.Null, hash, CryptoStreamMode.Write);
        cs.Write(dataBuffer, 0, dataBuffer.Length);
        cs.Close();

        var deformatter = new RSAPKCS1SignatureDeformatter(publicKey);
        deformatter.SetHashAlgorithm("MD5");

        return deformatter.VerifySignature(hash, signatureBytes);
  }

The public key itself is an X509 Certificate - constructed from a .cer file, stored as assembly resource i.e.

byte[] data; // data is read from a resource stream.
var publicKey = new X509Certificate2(data, "", X509KeyStorageFlags.MachineKeySet).PublicKey.Key

What I'm looking to do is emulate this functionality in Java, so I can verify the signature generated by some code in C#... I've started investigating the crypto functionality of Java, but I'm a bit of a java noob. Here's what I've come up with so far:

byte[] certContents=null;
byte[] signature=null;
String contents = "abc";

// load cert
CertificateFactory factory = CertificateFactory.getInstance("X.509");
X509Certificate cert = (X509Certificate) factory.generateCertificate(new ByteArrayInputStream(certContents));

// grab public key
RSAPublicKey publicKey = (RSAPublicKey)cert.getPublicKey();

// get sha1 hash for contents        
Mac mac = Mac.getInstance("HmacSHA1");
mac.update(contents.getBytes());                
byte[] hash = mac.doFinal();

// get cipher
Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("RSA");
cipher.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, publicKey);

// verify signature of contents matches signature passed to method somehow (and this is where I'm stuck)

Can anyone provide any insight into how I can verify the signature - or provide links to some resources which might explain the java.crypto and java.security.cert usage better then the run of the mill java docs.

Answer 1

That C# code looks really confusing to me. It use SHA1CryptoServiceProvider but uses MD5 hash so I can't tell which hashing algorithm it's using. I assume it's MD5.

The signature verification process involves padding so your code wouldn't work. Following is some snippet from my code and you can use it to verify the signature. data is the bytes to sign and sigBytes holds the signature.

String algorithm = "MD5withRSA";

// Initialize JCE provider    
Signature verifier = Signature.getInstance(algorithm);

// Do the verification   
boolean result=false;

try {
    verifier.initVerify(cert); // This one checks key usage in the cert
    verifier.update(data);
    result = verifier.verify(sigBytes);
}
catch (Exception e) {
    throw new VerificationException("Verification error: "+e, e);
}