Question

I am implementing a demo for RSA Encryption and Decryption in Android. I can Perform Encryption very well, but In Decryption I get an Exception: >>java.security.InvalidKeyException: unknown key type passed to RSA.

    KeyPairGenerator kpg;
    KeyPair kp;
    PublicKey publicKey;
    PrivateKey privateKey;
    byte [] encryptedBytes,decryptedBytes;
    Cipher cipher,cipher1;
    String encrypted,decrypted;

    public String RSAEncrypt (final String plain) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, NoSuchPaddingException, InvalidKeyException, IllegalBlockSizeException, BadPaddingException 
    {
        kpg = KeyPairGenerator.getInstance("RSA");
        kpg.initialize(1024);
        kp = kpg.genKeyPair();
        publicKey = kp.getPublic();
        privateKey = kp.getPrivate();

        cipher = Cipher.getInstance("RSA");
        cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, publicKey);
        encryptedBytes = cipher.doFinal(plain.getBytes());
        encrypted = new String(encryptedBytes);
        System.out.println("EEncrypted?????"+encrypted);
        return encrypted;

    }

    public String RSADecrypt (final String result) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, NoSuchPaddingException, InvalidKeyException, IllegalBlockSizeException, BadPaddingException 
    {

        cipher1=Cipher.getInstance("RSA");
        cipher1.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, privateKey);
        decryptedBytes = cipher1.doFinal(result.getBytes());
        decrypted = new String(decryptedBytes);
        System.out.println("DDecrypted?????"+decrypted);
        return decrypted;

    }

And I am calling the function from here:

encrypt.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener()
        { 
            public void onClick(View arg0) 
            {
                    try
                    {
                        RSAEncrypt rsaencrypt=new RSAEncrypt();
                        rsaencrypt.RSAEncrypt(name);

                        result=rsaencrypt.RSAEncrypt(name);
                        Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), result.toString(),Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

                        System.out.println("Result:"+result);
                    }
                    catch(Exception e)
                    {
                        e.printStackTrace();
                        Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), e.toString(),Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
                    }
            }
        });

        decrypt.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener()
        { 
            public void onClick(View arg0) 
            {
                {
                    try
                    {
                        RSAEncrypt rsadecrypt=new RSAEncrypt();

                        rsadecrypt.RSADecrypt(result);

                        ans=rsadecrypt.RSADecrypt(result);
                        System.out.println("Result is"+ans);
                        Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), ans.toString(),Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
                    }
                    catch(Exception e)
                    {
                        e.printStackTrace();
                        Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), e.toString(),Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
                        System.out.println("Exception is>>"+e);
                    }
            }
        });

Answer 1

In RSA you should use the public key for encryption and the private key for decryption.

Your sample code uses for encryption and decryption the public key – this can not work.

Hence in the decryption part you should initialize the cipher this way:

cipher1.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, privateKey);

Furthermor your code has a second significant bug:

You are converting a byte array with binary content to a String.

Never ever convert binary data to a String!

Strings are for string characters, not binary data. If you want to pack binary data into a String encode it to printable characters for example using Hex or Base64.

The following example uses the hexadecimal encoder fro org.apache.common.codec package – a third party library with has to be installed.

public byte[] RSAEncrypt(final String plain) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, NoSuchPaddingException,
        InvalidKeyException, IllegalBlockSizeException, BadPaddingException {
    kpg = KeyPairGenerator.getInstance("RSA");
    kpg.initialize(2048);
    kp = kpg.genKeyPair();
    publicKey = kp.getPublic();
    privateKey = kp.getPrivate();

    cipher = Cipher.getInstance("RSA");
    cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, publicKey);
    encryptedBytes = cipher.doFinal(plain.getBytes());
    System.out.println("EEncrypted?????" + new String(org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Hex.encodeHex(encryptedBytes)));
    return encryptedBytes;
}

public String RSADecrypt(final byte[] encryptedBytes) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, NoSuchPaddingException,
        InvalidKeyException, IllegalBlockSizeException, BadPaddingException {

    cipher1 = Cipher.getInstance("RSA");
    cipher1.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, privateKey);
    decryptedBytes = cipher1.doFinal(encryptedBytes);
    decrypted = new String(decryptedBytes);
    System.out.println("DDecrypted?????" + decrypted);
    return decrypted;
}