J2EE™ and Beyond: Design, Develop, and Deploy World-Class Java™ Software

JCE Example

A common implementation of secret key cryptography is application password encryption and decryption. There are two problems often associated with secret key or asymmetric cryptography. One is the requirement that both encryption and decryption require the same key, so the receiver of an encrypted document must somehow be given the key of the party that encrypted the document. The other is that if an unauthorized third party were to obtain access to the secret key, he or she could decrypt the messages or impersonate the sender and encrypt messages, so the physical security of the secret key is important.

Password encryption applications are a good fit for secret key encryption because they usually reside on only a few servers, which ...