Can using BouncyCastle be an alternative to installing the policy files?

Question

Hey, sorry if this is a dumb question but I have been looking into this all day.
I want to write a program that incorporates unlimited strength encryption, but installing the JCE Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files is not an option (I can do it on one of the development machines, but I don't have write access to JAVAHOME on the other, and I can't expect every user of the program to install these files).
Now I know that if I specify BouncyCastle as a provider when using JCE, I still have to install the above files... but what if I don't use JCE and I use the algorithms provided (handily without any form of documentation whatsoever) by BouncyCastle - can this be a workaround? I've heard conflicting views on this.
If this isn't the case, can anyone please point me in the right direction of what I could do instead? Ie. if there was some way to include these files in the classpath rather than actually install them.
Also, if using BC is a solution to problem, I would really appreciate it if anyone has such an example of AES-256 encryption and decryption with CBC and padding that they could point me in the direction of, I am having a real issue figuring out the BC API.
Thank-you so much if you can help me.

Answer 1

As long as you use the BouncyCastle lightweight crypto API rather than the JCE you should not encounter any of the JCE's restrictions. This means you cannot use Cipher.getInstance("Whatever/ABCCBC/TooMuchPadding", "BC"). Just include the lightweight api jar in your class path; the source is here: http://www.bouncycastle.org/download/lcrypto-jdk1<whatever>-139.zip
I haven't played with bouncycastle in awhile, but I think something like this will get you started:
BlockCipher aes = new AESEngine();
CBCBlockCipher aes_cbc = new CBCBlockCipher(aes);
byte [] key = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16}; // 16 bytes for AES-128
CipherParameters params = new KeyParameter(key);
aes_cbc.init(true, params);
//...