Java Cryptography

Signature

To implement an ElGamal signature class, we’ll have to implement the Service Provider Interface (SPI) of Signature, which is contained in SignatureSpi . I talked briefly about the SPI in Chapter 3; SignatureSpi contains all the methods you need to define to implement a signature algorithm:

            package oreilly.jonathan.crypto;

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.math.BigInteger;
import java.security.*;

public class ElGamalSignature
    extends SignatureSpi {

A Signature is intialized with a key, which is used later to either generate or verify a signature value. We’ll save the intialization key in a member variable until we need it:

protected ElGamalKey mKey;

As data is added to our ElGamalSignature with the update() method, we’ll accumulate it in a ByteArrayOutputStream. When the time comes to generate or verify the signature value, we’ll use the data from this stream:

protected ByteArrayOutputStream mOut;

In the signature calculations, later, we’ll frequently make use of the number 1 as a BigInteger. Here, I use a static member variable to hold this special value:

protected static BigInteger kOne = BigInteger.valueOf(1);

When the initVerify() method of Signature is called, it eventually calls the SPI method engineInitVerify() . In our implementation, we first check to make sure we’ve received an ElGamalPublicKey because a public key is always used to verify a signature. Then we save the key and create a new ByteArrayOutputStream to hold the data that will be used to ...