I've read about the Adobe CryptoSupport that is now in CQ5.5+, which is meant to provide a utility for encrypting and decrypting data, for example, to store API keys in the JCR more securely.
The JavaDocs or the general Adobe documentation give no details on its implementation, just stating that:
Note that this method and the decrypt(byte[]) method provide full
round trip support:
decrypt(encrypt(plainText)).equals(plainText) == true
Please note,
that calling this method twice on the same plainText does not return
the same cipher text:
encrypt(plainText).equals(encrypt(plainText)) == false
This is reasonably useful, but what it doesn't tell me is how these ciphers are enncrypted to begin with. I've tried encrypting on one CQ instance & decrypting on another, but this doesn't seem to work.
To use this feature with confidence, I'd like to know on what CQ bases its encrypted.
There are two main concerns I have:
How do I know that the service is salted (think that's the correct term) based on something secure? Or if it needs to be configured, how do I do that? (i.e. does it use the equivalent level of security OOTB as a log-in of 'admin/admin'!)
If the encryption is environment specific, does this mean that I cannot encrypt data & then transfer across between servers?
Bundle description in the Felix console states that
The Crypto Support bundle provides a CryptoSupport services which
allows applications to encrypt and decrypt binary and String data.
Encryption is based on the symmetric AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding (AES
algorithm, CBC mode with PKCS5 padding) from the RSA JSafe libary.
Key is randomly generated during the first start of the Adobe Granite Crypto Support bundle and then saved as /etc/key/master property. It is per-instance by design and I don't think it's a good idea to move this key between CQ installations. Actually, Adobe says it's a good idea to move key between author and publish instances.
Answering your questions:
you don't need to worry about configuring the service as it's done automatically during the first bundle activation,
you can move encrypted data from one instance to another as long as you also move the key.
Related
What will be the most secure way in java to Pass username and password encrypted between 2 backend systems written in Java behind the vpn?
The goal will be that if the username and password encrypted being captured by someone, it could never be decrypted.
Theoritically speaking, asymmetric encryption tools are used for transporting confidential data. Every node/client will has a pair of keys that one of them is private and only known by itself, and the other one is public and should be known by everbody that wants to send confidential data to that particular node. The thing is, if a payload data is encrypted with the public key of the client X, it can only be decrypted with the private key of the client X.
Protocols like SSL, TLS, etc. are some widely used implementations of that concept.
assuming you can control both servers in an un-monitored manner(or at least not monitored by the intruder) and could implement any code on both servers then:
you can write your own made up protocol and its encryption algorithms on both systems and use it to share your data between your two systems.
this way the intruder would have no clue what the captured data even is or how to interpret them.
since you said 'Never be decrypted' your protocol could use an encryption key which is already defined on both servers and is not exchanged between them(over a handshake for example) and could use an encryption algorithm which doesn't store any encryption key validation in the transmitted data(like padding or hash etc) and of course shouldn't exchange the encryption algorithm.
it is worth noting that ssl/tls or any other protocol which expose their encryption algorithm and exchange encryption keys used are bad ideas to reach your goal since these protocols are prone to be deciphered if certain portions of their traffic are captured.
The SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) is one of the popular cryptographic hash functions. A cryptographic hash can be used to make a signature for a text or a data file.
The SHA-256 algorithm generates an almost-unique, fixed-size 256-bit (32-byte) hash. This is a one-way function, so the result cannot be decrypted back to the original value.
Currently, SHA-2 hashing is widely used as it is being considered as the most secure hashing algorithm in the cryptographic arena.
A few library like Guava or Apache commons codec provide the functions.
In your case, I suggest you send the Username in clear text, but send the password use the SHA encrypted, since it cannot be decrypted, in another backend system, you have save the enrypted String somewhere safe like Database, when the password send over, you just need to see the encrypted string match.
This is nice tutorial article talk about SHA in java:
https://www.baeldung.com/sha-256-hashing-java
I have an Android application that communicates with another java application. For the data encryption i use the javax.crypto library to encrypt and decrypt the data with a pre-shared key.
According to this question it's possible to get the source code from an APK file. So if somebody is able to read the source code of my application, he's also able to read/manipulate the encrypted data.
It's probably true, so is there a way to prevent this (additional measures, other security method)? Don't know if it have extra value but here is my encryption code:
private static String IV = "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA";
private static String ENCRYPTION_KEY = "0123456789abcdef";
Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/NoPadding");
SecretKeySpec key = new SecretKeySpec(ENCRYPTION_KEY.getBytes("UTF-8"), "AES");
cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key,new IvParameterSpec(IV.getBytes("UTF-8")));
return cipher.doFinal(input.getBytes("UTF-8"));
EDIT:
Communication is send and recieving by NFC. My main issue is, if someone has the key he's able to read and write (abused) information to the other side (the NFC reader)
The pre-shared key is not safe!
For someone with just little java reverse engineering skills it is a job of five minutes to decompile your APK file and extracting the key. Once this has been done your crypto is effectively useless.
The standard approach to fix this is to use a key agreement algorithm. You can for example use the Diffie-Hellman key exchange to quickly and secure generate a common secret between two devices: Wikipedia on Diffie-Hellman
Build a hash from the generated common secret and use this as your AES encryption key for this session is a lot more secure and doesn't take much work.
If NFC is your transport layer you need bidirectional data exchanges for Diffie-Hellman to work. Therefore Android Beam will not be usable for you. You can however do bidirectinal data-transfer using host based card emulation on one phone and reader/writer mode on the other.
Using encryption when transmitting data over NFC is a good idea by the way, also the communication range is limited to some few centimeters, you can still sniff the communication from a few meters distance. NFC doesn't do any encryption for you.
A last word of warning: Cryptography is hard to do in practice. Before you send out anything of value over a cryptographic link please make sure that you have a good understanding of what you do. I recommend reading this book which is a good and practical introduction of cryptography: Bruce Schneider - Cryptography Engineering
I am currently making an app that will need to save sensitive data in J2ME, either in RMS or using LWUIT's storage class. (For example username and password)
How secure is such an implementation, and what are the steps to take in order to make sure the data is secure and not vulnerable to theft?
RMS is not encrypted - an attacker can easily read off any data. You'll need to encrypt the data - I recommend the Bouncycastle AES provider, but the Java AES provider also works (although it isn't as efficient, and you'll need to enable 256-bit keys on it). See the accepted answer to this question for some example code, I don't recommend changing anything in the code without asking StackOverflow or another good Q&A site first (it's very easy to incorrectly use encryption libraries); the code uses the Java crypto provider, to use the Bouncycastle provider use Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS7Padding", new BouncyCastleProvider()) after you import the Bouncycastle library. Important to note is that the code generates a Keyspec spec from a char[] password - the user will need to enter this password at least once per session in order for you to decrypt the data (you can't store the password on the device, that would defeat the purpose of encrypting the data). Also important is that you'll need to use the same IV (initialization vector) in the encryption and decryption phases; this IV should be unique to each record that you're encrypting (e.g. when you encrypt foo.txt then use a different IV than when you encrypt bar.txt), but it does not need to be secret (you can store it in plaintext alongside the encrypted file). As an added precaution, wipe the char[] password when you're done with it.
My requirement is to find best algorithm use to secure data sent using XML over network. This is important data which is to be exchanged between third parties.
I know about DES which is quite outdated these days. MD5 appeared as another option but this does not allow decryption to get data back(please correct me if I am wrong)
What other options do we have to accomplish above task and which is best and most standard way to do it?
Tried out AES, it uses common key for encryption and decryption. Other option I explored was RSA, which has two keys public and private, for encryption and decryption.
Not able to decide about better approach of above two.
You can use Advanced Encryption Standard(AES).The differences between AES and DES
There's a W3C standard for this, it's called XML Encryption Syntax and Processing, which uses a cipher like a DES/3DES-CBC symmetric key cipher.
How to exchange the public key to the client place. i have encrypted a document(text file) using RSA algorithm by using private key and then stored the public key as an java.security.Key object in a file using serialization.I want to know about the integrity of the serialized public key object whether it is safe option to do or any other option available.
A public key is usually just exchanged as a piece of text. It is then imported into a keystore. The exact method of doing is depends on the implementation (I've always used PGP).
I wouldn't expose the key as a serialized form of java.security.Key because it's not really standard. The key in it's simple form is the standard form of interchange.
On exposing the key as a download: it's public, so there's nothing an intruder could do by downloading your key. The only thing that could go wrong is that someone could fake your server and host a different key. Then sign with that key's private key and claim to be you. Of course you could have the same issue if you mailed it to somebody. But then at least you would know who you mailed it to.
The safest approach is to spread the key out-of-bound. Like on a usb stick.
Depending on your cause, I think you can live with the risk.
Joeri has answered on the security aspects - I have nothing to add about that.
The main problem you might have is the serialized representation changing between library versions, which is a potential issue with any use of Java serialization.
Of course there are other ways to do it. The RSA public key should have an industry-standard encoding which you can access using the getEncoded() method. This gives you an array of bytes which you can write to a FileOutputStream. So it's really easy.