Documentation Contents

Java Cryptography Architecture Oracle Providers Documentation for JDK 8

The following topics are covered:

• Introduction
• Import Limits on Cryptographic Algorithms
• Cipher Transformations
• SecureRandom Implementations
• The SunPKCS11 Provider
• The SUN Provider
• The SunRsaSign Provider
• The SunJSSE Provider
• The SunJCE Provider
• The SunJGSS Provider
• The SunSASL Provider
• The XMLDSig Provider
• The SunPCSC Provider
• The SunMSCAPI Provider
• The SunEC Provider
• The OracleUcrypto Provider
• The Apple Provider

Note: The Standard Names Documentation contains more information about the standard names used in this document.

Introduction

The Java platform defines a set of APIs spanning major security areas, including cryptography, public key infrastructure, authentication, secure communication, and access control. These APIs allow developers to easily integrate security mechanisms into their application code. The Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) and its Provider Architecture is a core concept of the Java Development Kit (JDK). It is assumed readers have a solid understanding of this architecture.

This document describes the technical details of the providers shipped as part of Oracle's Java Environment.

Reminder: Cryptographic implementations in the JDK are distributed through several different providers (SUN, SunJSSE, SunJCE, SunRsaSign) for both historical reasons and by the types of services provided. General purpose applications SHOULD NOT request cryptographic services from specific providers. That is:

getInstance("...", "SunJCE");  // not recommended

versus

getInstance("...");            // recommended

Otherwise, applications are tied to specific providers that may not be available on other Java implementations. They also might not be able to take advantage of available optimized providers (for example, hardware accelerators via PKCS11 or native OS implementations such as Microsoft's MSCAPI) that have a higher preference order than the specific requested provider.

Import Limits on Cryptographic Algorithms

By default, an application can use cryptographic algorithms of any strength. However, due to import regulations in some locations, you may have to limit the strength of those algorithms. The JDK provides two different sets of jurisdiction policy files, "limited" and "unlimited", in the directory <java-home>/jre/lib/security/policy that determine the strength of cryptographic algorithms. Information about jurisdiction policy files and how to activate them is available in Appendix C: Cryptographic Strength Configuration.

Consult your export/import control counsel or attorney to determine the exact requirements for your location.

For the "limited" configuration, the following table lists the maximum key sizes allowed by the "limited" set of jurisdiction policy files:

Cipher Transformations

The javax.crypto.Cipher.getInstance(String transformation) factory method generates Ciphers using transformations of the form algorithm/mode/padding. If the mode/padding are omitted, the SunJCE and SunPKCS11 providers use ECB as the default mode and PKCS5Padding as the default padding for many symmetric ciphers.

It is recommended to use transformations that fully specify the algorithm, mode, and padding instead of relying on the defaults.

Note: ECB works well for single blocks of data and can be parallelized, but absolutely should not be used for multiple blocks of data.

SecureRandom Implementations

The following table lists the default preference order of the available SecureRandom implementations.

* The SunPKCS11 provider is available on all platforms, but is only enabled by default on Solaris as it is the only OS with a native PKCS11 implementation automatically installed and configured. On other platforms, applications or deployers must specifically install and configure a native PKCS11 library, and then configure and enable the SunPKCS11 provider to use it.

** On Solaris, Linux, and macOS, if the entropy gathering device in java.security is set to file:/dev/urandom or file:/dev/random, then NativePRNG is preferred to SHA1PRNG. Otherwise, SHA1PRNG is preferred.

*** There is currently no NativePRNG on Windows. Access to the equivalent functionality is via the SunMSCAPI provider.

If there are no SecureRandom implementations registered in the JCA framework, java.security.SecureRandom will use the hardcoded SHA1PRNG.

The SunPKCS11 Provider

The Cryptographic Token Interface Standard (PKCS#11) provides native programming interfaces to cryptographic mechanisms, such as hardware cryptographic accelerators and Smart Cards. When properly configured, the SunPKCS11 provider enables applications to use the standard JCA/JCE APIs to access native PKCS#11 libraries. The SunPKCS11 provider itself does not contain cryptographic functionality, it is simply a conduit between the Java environment and the native PKCS11 providers. The Java PKCS#11 Reference Guide has a much more detailed treatment of this provider.

The SUN Provider

JDK 1.1 introduced the Provider architecture. The first JDK provider was named SUN, and contained two types of cryptographic services (MessageDigests and Signatures). In later releases, other mechanisms were added (SecureRandom number generators, KeyPairGenerators, KeyFactorys, and so on.).

United States export regulations in effect at the time placed significant restrictions on the type of cryptographic functionality that could be made available internationally in the JDK. For this reason, the SUN provider has historically contained cryptographic engines that did not directly encrypt or decrypt data.

The following algorithms are available in the SUN provider:

The following table lists OIDs associated with SHA Message Digests:

The following table lists OIDs associated with DSA Signatures:

Keysize Restrictions

The SUN provider uses the following default keysizes (in bits) and enforces the following restrictions:

KeyPairGenerator

AlgorithmParameterGenerator

CertificateFactory/CertPathBuilder/CertPathValidator/CertStore Implementations

Additional details on the SUN provider implementations for CertificateFactory, CertPathBuilder, CertPathValidator and CertStore are documented in Appendix B of the PKI Programmer's Guide.

The SunRsaSign Provider

The SunRsaSign provider was introduced in JDK 1.3 as an enhanced replacement for the RSA signatures in the SunJSSE provider.

The following algorithms are available in the SunRsaSign provider:

Keysize Restrictions

The SunRsaSign provider uses the following default keysize (in bits) and enforces the following restriction:

KeyPairGenerator

The SunJSSE Provider

The Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE) was originally released as a separate "Optional Package" (also briefly known as a "Standard Extension"), and was available for JDK 1.2.n and 1.3.n. The SunJSSE provider was introduced as part of this release.

In earlier JDK releases, there were no RSA signature providers available in the JDK, therefore SunJSSE had to provide its own RSA implementation in order to use commonly available RSA-based certificates. JDK 5 introduced the SunRsaSign provider, which provides all the functionality (and more) of the SunJSSE provider. Applications targeted at JDK 5.0 and later should request instances of the SunRsaSign provider instead. For backward compatibility, the RSA algorithms are still available through this provider, but are actually implemented in the SunRsaSign provider.

Algorithms

The following algorithms are available in the SunJSSE provider:

Footnote 1 The PKCS12 KeyStore implementation does not support the KeyBag type.

Protocols

The following table lists the protocol parameters that the SunJSSE provider supports:

Footnote 1 - TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are versions of the TLS protocol that are no longer considered secure and have been superseded by more secure and modern versions (TLS 1.2 and 1.3). These versions have now been disabled by default. If you encounter issues, you can, at your own risk, re-enable the versions by removing TLSv1 or TLSv1.1 from the jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms Security Property in the java.security configuration file.

Footnote 2 - The SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2 protocols allow you to send SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2 ClientHellos encapsulated in an SSLv2 format hello by using the SSLv2Hello pseudo-protocol. The following table illustrates which connection combinations are possible when using SSLv2Hellos:

Note: The protocols available by default in a JDK release change as new protocols are developed and old protocols are found to be less effective than previously thought. The JDK uses two mechanisms to restrict the availability of these protocols:

• The jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms Security Property: This disables categories of protocols and cipher suites. For example, if this Security Property contains SSLv3, then the SSLv3 protocol would be disabled. See Disabled and Restricted Cryptographic Algorithms for information about this Security Property.
• Moving the protocol to the list of protocols not enabled by default as indicated in the previous table.

Cipher Suites

SunJSSE supports a large number of cipher suites. The two tables that follow show the cipher suites supported by SunJSSE in preference order and the release in which they were introduced.

The first table lists the cipher suites that are enable by default. The second table shows cipher suites that are supported by SunJSSE but disabled by default.

Footnote 1 Cipher suites with SHA384 and SHA256 are available only for TLS 1.2 or later.

Footnote 2 TLS_EMPTY_RENEGOTIATION_INFO_SCSV is a new pseudo-cipher suite to support RFC 5746. See Transport Layer Security (TLS) Renegotiation Issue for more information.

Footnote 1 RFC 5246 TLS 1.2 forbids the use of these suites. These can be used in the SSLv3/TLS1.0/TLS1.1 protocols, but cannot be used in TLS 1.2 and later.

Footnote 2 RFC 4346 TLS 1.1 forbids the use of these suites. These can be used in the SSLv3/TLS1.0 protocols, but cannot be used in TLS 1.1 and later.

Cipher suites that use AES_256 require installation of the JCE Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files. See Import Limits on Cryptographic Algorithms.

Cipher suites that use Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECDSA, ECDH, ECDHE, ECDH_anon) require a JCE cryptographic provider that meets the following requirements:

• The provider must implement ECC as defined by the classes and interfaces in the packages java.security.spec and java.security.interfaces. The getAlgorithm() method of elliptic curve key objects must return the string "EC".

• The provider must support the Signature algorithms SHA1withECDSA and NONEwithECDSA, the KeyAgreement algorithm ECDH, and a KeyPairGenerator and a KeyFactory for algorithm EC. If one of these algorithms is missing, SunJSSE will not allow EC cipher suites to be used.

• The provider must support all the SECG curves referenced in RFC 4492 specification, section 5.1.1 (see also appendix A). In certificates, points should be encoded using the uncompressed form and curves should be encoded using the namedCurve choice, that is, using an object identifier.

If these requirements are not met, EC cipher suites may not be negotiated correctly.

Tighter Checking of EncryptedPreMasterSecret Version Numbers

Prior to the JDK 7 release, the SSL/TLS implementation did not check the version number in PreMasterSecret, and the SSL/TLS client did not send the correct version number by default. Unless the system property com.sun.net.ssl.rsaPreMasterSecretFix is set to true, the TLS client sends the active negotiated version, but not the expected maximum version supported by the client.

For compatibility, this behavior is preserved for SSL version 3.0 and TLS version 1.0. However, for TLS version 1.1 or later, the implementation tightens checking the PreMasterSecret version numbers as required by RFC 5246. Clients always send the correct version number, and servers check the version number strictly. The system property, com.sun.net.ssl.rsaPreMasterSecretFix, is not used in TLS 1.1 or later.

The SunJCE Provider

As described briefly in The SUN Provider, US export regulations at the time restricted the type of cryptographic functionality that could be made available in the JDK. A separate API and reference implementation was developed that allowed applications to encrypt/decrypt data. The Java Cryptographic Extension (JCE) was released as a separate "Optional Package" (also briefly known as a "Standard Extension"), and was available for JDK 1.2.x and 1.3.x. During the development of JDK 1.4, regulations were relaxed enough that JCE (and SunJSSE) could be bundled as part of the JDK.

The following algorithms are available in the SunJCE provider:

The following table lists cipher algorithms available in the SunJCE provider.

Footnote 1 Though the standard doesn't specify or require the padding bytes to be random, the Java SE ISO10126Padding implementation pads with random bytes (until the last byte, which provides the length of padding, as specified).

Footnote 2 PBEWithMD5AndTripleDES is a proprietary algorithm that has not been standardized.

Keysize Restrictions

The SunJCE provider uses the following default keysizes (in bits) and enforces the following restrictions:

KeyGenerator

Note: The various Password-Based Encryption (PBE) algorithms use various algorithms to generate key data, and ultimately depends on the targeted Cipher algorithm. For example, "PBEWithMD5AndDES" will always generate 56-bit keys.

KeyPairGenerator

AlgorithmParameterGenerator

The SunJGSS Provider

The following algorithms are available in the SunJGSS provider:

The SunSASL Provider

The following algorithms are available in the SunSASL provider:

The XMLDSig Provider

The following algorithms are available in the XMLDSig provider:

The SunPCSC Provider

The SunPCSC provider enables applications to use the Java Smart Card I/O API to interact with the PC/SC Smart Card stack of the underlying operating system. On some operating systems, it may be necessary to enable and configure the PC/SC stack before it is usable. Consult your operating system documentation for details.

On Solaris and Linux platforms, SunPCSC accesses the PC/SC stack via the libpcsclite.so library. It looks for this library in the directories /usr/$LIBISA and /usr/local/$LIBISA, where $LIBISA is expanded to lib on 32-bit platforms, lib/64 on 64-bit Solaris platforms, and lib64 on 64-bit Linux platforms. The system property sun.security.smartcardio.library may also be set to the full filename of an alternate libpcsclite.so implementation. On Windows platforms, SunPCSC always calls into winscard.dll and no Java-level configuration is necessary or possible.

If PC/SC is available on the host platform, the SunPCSC implementation can be obtained via TerminalFactory.getDefault() and TerminalFactory.getInstance("PC/SC"). If PC/SC is not available or not correctly configured, a getInstance() call will fail with a NoSuchAlgorithmException and getDefault() will return a JRE built-in implementation that does not support any terminals.

The following algorithms are available in the SunPCSC provider:

The SunMSCAPI Provider

The SunMSCAPI provider enables applications to use the standard JCA/JCE APIs to access the native cryptographic libraries, certificates stores and key containers on the Microsoft Windows platform. The SunMSCAPI provider itself does not contain cryptographic functionality, it is simply a conduit between the Java environment and the native cryptographic services on Windows.

The following algorithms are available in the SunMSCAPI provider:

Keysize Restrictions

The SunMSCAPI provider uses the following default keysizes (in bits) and enforce the following restrictions:

KeyGenerator

The SunEC Provider

The SunEC provider implements Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC). Compared to traditional cryptosystems such as RSA, ECC offers equivalent security with smaller key sizes, which results in faster computations, lower power consumption, and memory and bandwidth savings. Applications can use the standard JCA/JCE APIs to access ECC functionality without the dependency on external ECC libraries (through SunPKCS11).

The following algorithms are available in the SunEC provider:

Footnote 1 This algorithm won't be available from the SunEC provider through the JCA/JCE APIs if you delete the SunEC provider's native library. See Effect of Removing SunEC Provider's Native Library.

Effect of Removing SunEC Provider's Native Library

The SunEC provider uses a native library to provide some ECC functionality. If you don't want to use this native library, then delete the following files (depending on your operating system):

• Linux: $JAVA_HOME/lib/libsunec.so
• macOS: $JAVA_HOME/lib/libsunec.dylib
• Windows: %JAVA_HOME%\bin\sunec.dll

If you delete the native library, then the algorithms with a footnote in the previous table won't be available from the SunEC provider through the JCA/JCE APIs.

Note: Other installed providers (for example, SunPCKS11) may still provide these algorithms.

Libraries and tools (for example, JSSE, XML Digital Signature, and keytool) that use these algorithms may have reduced functionality. For example, JSSE may no longer be able to generate EC keypairs, use EC-based peer certificates, or perform ECDH/ECDHE key agreements for SSL/TLS connections. Ciphersuites such as TLS_*_ECDSA and TLS_ECDHE_* may be unavailable. SSL/TLS connections can still use alternate algorithms to secure connections, such as RSA-/DSA-based certificates and key agreements based on DH/DHE (RFC 2631) or FFDHE (RFC 7919).

Even if the native library is removed, the rest of the algorithms (the algorithms without a footnote) are still available from the SunEC provider, as they are not implemented in the native library code.

Keysize Restrictions

The SunEC provider uses the following default keysizes (in bits) and enforces the following restrictions:

KeyPairGenerator

Supported Elliptic Curve Names

The SunEC provider includes implementations of various elliptic curves for use with the EC, Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) algorithms. Some of these curves have been implemented using modern formulas and techniques that are valuable for preventing side-channel attacks. The others are legacy curves that might be more vulnerable to attacks and should not be used. The tables below list the curves that fall into each of these categories.

In the following tables, the first column, Curve Name, lists the name that SunEC implements. The second column, Object Identifier, specifies the EC name's object identifier. The third column, Additional Names/Aliases, specifies any additional names or aliases for that curve. All strings that appear in one row refer to the same curve. For example, the strings secp256r1, 1.2.840.10045.3.1.7, NIST P-256, and X9.62 prime256v1 refer to the same curve. You can use the curve names to create parameter specifications for EC parameter generation with the ECGenParameterSpec class.

Recommended Curves

The following table lists the elliptic curves that are provided by the SunEC provider and are implemented using modern formulas and techniques. These curves are recommended and should be preferred over the curves listed in the section Legacy Curves Retained for Compatibility.

Legacy Curves Retained for Compatibility

It is recommended that you migrate to newer curves.

The following table lists elliptic curves that are provided by the SunEC provider and are not implemented using modern formulas and techniques. These curves remain available for compatibility reasons to afford legacy systems time to migrate to newer curves. These implementations will be removed or replaced in a future version of the JDK.

The OracleUcrypto Provider

The Solaris-only security provider OracleUcrypto leverages the Solaris Ucrypto library to offload and delegate cryptographic operations supported by the Oracle SPARC T4 based on-core cryptographic instructions. The OracleUcrypto provider itself does not contain cryptographic functionality; it is simply a conduit between the Java environment and the Solaris Ucrypto library.

If the underlying Solaris Ucrypto library does not support a particular algorithm, then the OracleUcrypto provider will not support it either. Consequently, at runtime, the supported algorithms consists of the intersection of those that the Solaris Ucrypto library supports and those that the OracleUcrypto provider recognizes.

Note that the OracleUcrypto provider is included only in Oracle's JDK. It is not part of OpenJDK.

The following algorithms are available in the OracleUcrypto provider:

Keysize Restrictions

The OracleUcrypto provider does not specify any default keysizes or keysize restrictions; these are specified by the underlying Solaris Ucrypto library.

OracleUcrypto Provider Configuration File

The OracleUcrypto provider has a configuration file named ucrypto-solaris.cfg that resides in the $JAVA_HOME/lib/security directory. Modify this configuration file to specify which algorithms to disable by default. For example, the following configuration file disables AES with CFB128 mode by default:

#
# Configuration file for the OracleUcrypto provider
#
disabledServices = {
  Cipher.AES/CFB128/PKCS5Padding
  Cipher.AES/CFB128/NoPadding
}

The Apple Provider

The Apple provider implements a java.security.KeyStore that provides access to the macOS Keychain.

The following algorithms are available in the Apple provider:

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