Java Network Programming, Third Edition

Confidential communication through an open channel such as the public Internet absolutely requires that data be encrypted. Most encryption schemes that lend themselves to computer implementation are based on the notion of a key, a slightly more general kind of password that's not limited to text. The clear text message is combined with the bits of the key according to a mathematical algorithm to produce the encrypted cipher text. Using keys with more bits makes messages exponentially more difficult to decrypt by brute-force guessing of the key.

In traditional secret key (or symmetric ) encryption, the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data. Both the sender and the receiver have to possess the single key. Imagine Angela wants to send Gus a secret message. She first sends Gus the key they'll use to exchange the secret. But the key can't be encrypted because Gus doesn't have the key yet, so Angela has to send the key unencrypted. Now suppose Edgar is eavesdropping on the connection between Angela and Gus. He will get the key at the same time that Gus does. From that point forward, he can read anything Angela and Gus say to each other using that key.

In public key (or asymmetric ) encryption, different keys are used to encrypt and decrypt the data. One key, called the public key, is used to encrypt the data. This key can be given to anyone . A different key, called the private key, is used to decrypt the data. This must be kept secret but needs to be possessed by only one of the correspondents. If Angela wants to send a message to Gus, she asks Gus for his public key. Gus sends it to her over an unencrypted connection. Angela uses Gus's public key to encrypt her message and sends it to him. If Edgar is eavesdropping when Gus sends Angela his key, Edgar also gets Gus's public key. However, this doesn't allow Edgar to decrypt the message Angela sends Gus, since decryption requires Gus's private key. The message is safe even if the public key is detected in transit.

Asymmetric encryption can also be used for authentication and message integrity checking. For this use, Angela would encrypt a message with her private key before sending it. When Gus received it, he'd decrypt it with Angela's public key. If the decryption succeeded, Gus would know that the message came from Angela. After all, no one else could have produced a message that would decrypt properly with her public key. Gus would also know that the message wasn't changed en route, either maliciously by Edgar or unintentionally by buggy software or network noise, since any such change would have screwed up the decryption. With a little more effort, Angela can double-encrypt the message, once with her private key, once with Gus's public key, thus getting all three benefits of privacy, authentication, and integrity.

In practice, public key encryption is much more CPU- intensive and much slower than secret key encryption. Therefore, instead of encrypting the entire transmission with Gus's public key, Angela encrypts a traditional secret key and sends it to Gus. Gus decrypts it with his private key. Now Angela and Gus both know the secret key, but Edgar doesn't. Therefore, Gus and Angela can now use faster secret-key encryption to communicate privately without Edgar listening in.

Edgar still has one good attack on this protocol, however. (Very important: the attack is on the protocol used to send and receive messages, not on the encryption algorithms used. This attack does not require Edgar to break Gus and Angela's encryption and is completely independent of key length.) Edgar can not only read Gus's public key when he sends it to Angela, but he can also replace it with his own public key! Then when Angela thinks she's encrypting a message with Gus's public key, she's really using Edgar's. When she sends a message to Gus, Edgar intercepts it, decrypts it using his private key, encrypts it using Gus's public key, and sends it on to Gus. This is called a man-in-the-middle attack . Working alone on an insecure channel, Gus and Angela have no easy way to protect against this. The solution used in practice is for both Gus and Angela to store and verify their public keys with a trusted third-party certification authority. Rather than sending each other their public keys, Gus and Angela retrieve each other's public key from the certification authority. This scheme still isn't perfectEdgar may be able to place himself in between Gus and the certification authority, Angela and the certification authority, and Gus and Angelabut it makes life harder for Edgar.

As this example indicates, the theory and practice of encryption and authentication, both algorithms and protocols, is a challenging field that's fraught with mines and pitfalls to surprise the amateur cryptographer. It is much easier to design a bad encryption algorithm or protocol than a good one. And it's not always obvious which algorithms and protocols are good and which aren't. Fortunately, you don't have to be a cryptography expert to use strong cryptography in Java network programs. JSSE shields you from the low-level details of how algorithms are negotiated, keys are exchanged, correspondents are authenticated, and data is encrypted. JSSE allows you to create sockets and server sockets that transparently handle the negotiations and encryption necessary for secure communication. All you have to do is send your data over the same streams and sockets you're familiar with from previous chapters. The Java Secure Socket Extension is divided into four packages:

javax.net.ssl

The abstract classes that define Java's API for secure network communication.

javax.net

The abstract socket factory classes used instead of constructors to create secure sockets.

javax.security.cert

A minimal set of classes for handling public key certificates that's needed for SSL in Java 1.1. (In Java 1.2 and later, the java.security.cert package should be used instead.)

com.sun.net.ssl

The concrete classes that implement the encryption algorithms and protocols in Sun's reference implementation of the JSSE. Technically, these are not part of the JSSE standard. Other implementers may replace this package with one of their own; for instance, one that uses native code to speed up the CPU-intensive key generation and encryption process.

None of these are included as a standard part of the JDK prior to Java 1.4. To use these with Java 1.3 and earlier, you have to download the JSSE from http://java.sun.com/products/jsse/ and install it. Third parties have also implemented this API, most notably Casey Marshall, who wrote Jessie (http://www.nongnu.org/jessie/), an open source implementation of JSSE published under the GPL with library exception.

Sun's reference implementation is distributed as a Zip file, which you can unpack and place anywhere on your system. In the lib directory of this Zip file, you'll find three JAR archives: jcert.jar , jnet.jar , and jsse.jar . These need to be placed in your class path or jre/lib/ext directory.

Next you need to register the cryptography provider by editing your jre/lib/ext/security/java.security file. Open this file in a text editor and look for a line like these:

security.provider.1=sun.security.provider.Sun security.provider.2=com.sun.rsajca.Provider

You may have more or fewer providers than this. However many you have, add one more line like this:

security.provider.3=com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Provider

You may have to change the "3" to 2 or 4 or 5 or whatever the next number is in the security provider sequence. If you install a third-party JSSE implementation, you'll add another line like this with the class name as specified by your JSSE implementation's documentation.

If you don't get this right, you'll see exceptions like "java.net.SocketException: SSL implementation not available" when you try to run programs that use the JSSE. Alternatively, instead of editing the java.policy file, you can add this line to classes that use Sun's implementation of the JSSE:

java.security.Security.addProvider( new com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Provider( ));

This may be useful if you're writing software to run on someone else's system and don't want to ask them to modify the java.policy file.