Java 256bit AES Encryption

Question

I need to implement 256 bit AES encryption, but all the examples I have found online use a "KeyGenerator" to generate a 256 bit key, but I would like to use my own passkey. How can I create my own key? I have tried padding it out to 256 bits, but then I get an error saying that the key is too long. I do have the unlimited jurisdiction patch installed, so thats not the problem :)

Ie. The KeyGenerator looks like this ...

// Get the KeyGenerator
KeyGenerator kgen = KeyGenerator.getInstance("AES");
kgen.init(128); // 192 and 256 bits may not be available

// Generate the secret key specs.
SecretKey skey = kgen.generateKey();
byte[] raw = skey.getEncoded();

Code taken from here

EDIT

I was actually padding the password out to 256 bytes, not bits, which is too long. The following is some code I am using now that I have some more experience with this.

byte[] key = null; // TODO
byte[] input = null; // TODO
byte[] output = null;
SecretKeySpec keySpec = null;
keySpec = new SecretKeySpec(key, "AES");
Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS7Padding");
cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, keySpec);
output = cipher.doFinal(input)

The "TODO" bits you need to do yourself :-)

Answer 1

What I've done in the past is hash the key via something like SHA256, then extract the bytes from the hash into the key byte[].

After you have your byte[] you can simply do:

SecretKeySpec key = new SecretKeySpec(keyBytes, "AES");
Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES");
cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key);
byte[] encryptedBytes = cipher.doFinal(clearText.getBytes());

Answer 2

Generating your own key from a byte array is easy:

byte[] raw = ...; // 32 bytes in size for a 256 bit key
Key skey = new javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec(raw, "AES");

But creating a 256-bit key isn't enough. If the key generator cannot generate 256-bit keys for you, then the Cipher class probably doesn't support AES 256-bit either. You say you have the unlimited jurisdiction patch installed, so the AES-256 cipher should be supported (but then 256-bit keys should be too, so this might be a configuration problem).

Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES");
cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, skey);
byte[] encrypted = cipher.doFinal(plainText.getBytes());

A workaround for lack of AES-256 support is to take some freely available implementation of AES-256, and use it as a custom provider. This involves creating your own Provider subclass and using it with Cipher.getInstance(String, Provider). But this can be an involved process.

Answer 3

Maybe you should try the BouncyCastle crypto provider. It is free and you can use larger key sizes than the default JDK.

Answer 4

i tried this and it works in one system. when i am trying to run in another system it gives error: algorithm aes not found