Question

I’m trying to implement RSA Encryption in both Java and PHP, but I can’t seem to get PHP to recognize my Java public/private keys. Here is the java code to Encode/Decode the Public and Private Keys:

public static byte[] EncodePublicKey(PublicKey _publickey) throws Exception
{
    return _publickey.getEncoded();
}

public static PublicKey DecodePublicKey(byte[] _encodedkey) throws Exception
{
    KeyFactory fac = KeyFactory.getInstance("RSA");
    X509EncodedKeySpec encodedKey = new X509EncodedKeySpec(_encodedkey);
    return fac.generatePublic(encodedKey);
}

public static byte[] EncodePrivateKey(PrivateKey _privatekey) throws Exception
{
    return _privatekey.getEncoded();
}

public static PrivateKey DecodePrivateKey(byte[] _encodedkey) throws Exception
{
    KeyFactory fac = KeyFactory.getInstance("RSA");
    PKCS8EncodedKeySpec encodedKey = new PKCS8EncodedKeySpec(_encodedkey);
    return fac.generatePrivate(encodedKey);
}

I first tried using the PEAR Crypt_RSA functions, but it doesn’t support X.509 or PKCS8 (it just simply base64 encodes the serialized modulus, exponent and key type). I then tried the OpenSSL “openssl_get_publickey” function but it doesn’t appear to recognize the format either.

Any help would be greatly appreciated o.O

Answer 1

You need to convert the binary format (DER) from Java to PEM for OpenSSL (and the PHP bindings). You can test your Java key files using the OpenSSL command line by specifying the -inform DER option on the command line.

<?
function pem2der($pem_data) {
  $begin = "KEY-----";
  $end   = "-----END";
  $pem_data = substr($pem_data, strpos($pem_data, $begin)+strlen($begin));
  $pem_data = substr($pem_data, 0, strpos($pem_data, $end));
  $der = base64_decode($pem_data);
  return $der;
}

function der2pem($der_data) {
  $pem = chunk_split(base64_encode($der_data), 64, "\n");
  $pem = "-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----\n".$pem."-----END PUBLIC KEY-----\n";
  return $pem;
}

// load the public key from a DER-encoded file
$pubkey = der2pem(file_get_contents("pubkey"));
?>

For more information about using OpenSSL keys in Java, check out this link.