Question

Hi this is the same question, that was asked two years ago:
Java/JCE: Decrypting “long” message encrypted with RSA

I had a large byte array and rsa keypair, initiated by value 1024.
Using rsa encryption and the specified size of the key is strong requirement, I can’t change it. So I can’t use symmetric encryption with asymetric encryption symmetric key. I can’t use any other keys. I had a byte array and need ciphered byte array to be returned. I wonder if there is any ready tool, that can manage with this problem?

Sorry for such an amateurish question, but I really need a help.

Answer 1

As stated, your question has a single answer, and that’s "no". RSA encryption is an algorithm which encrypts messages up to a given size, which depends on the key size; with a 1024-bit RSA key, and RSA as the standard describes it, the maximum size is 117 bytes, no more. There is no way to encrypt a larger message with RSA alone, and that’s a definite, mathematical certainty.

If you really need to process longer messages, then you necessarily have to add something else. In that case, please, please, do not try to do anything fancy of your own devising with some oh-so-clever splitting of data into small blocks and the like. That path leads to doom. You might produce something which appears to compile and run, but which will be invariably weak in some way, like almost every other home-made variation on cryptography. That’s because security cannot be tested: it is not a case of "works" or "does not work".

The well-trodden path of asymmetric encryption goes thus:

1. You select a random sequence of bytes of some appropriate length, e.g. 128 bits (that’s 16 bytes). Let’s call it K.
2. You encrypt K with the RSA public key; this yields E.
3. You encrypt the message with K using a symmetric encryption algorithm ("AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding"). Since this is a one-shot key, you can use an all-zeros IV. This yields a bunch of bytes, let’s call it F.
4. The encrypted message is then the concatenation of E and F.

Decryption proceeds in the reverse order: the RSA private key is used to recover K from E, then K is used to decrypt F into the original message. The key K is never stored anywhere, and a new key K is generated every time (even if you encrypt the same message twice). That’s important, do not change that unless you understand what you are doing (and if you do, then you already know that).

Given what you state about your problem, you have to do something else than "just RSA". The procedure I describe above is about the best "something else" that you could come up with, security-wise.

Assembling some cryptographic elements into such a protocol is a process fraught with pitfalls so you may have better luck using an already defined format and support library. Two common formats for asymmetric encryption are CMS and OpenPGP. A library which supports both and has good reputation is Bouncy Castle.