Java-oracle-java encryption-decryption error.

Question

Hi
We have a program which encrypts strings using DES and writes the encrypted to an oracle data. The code is similar to the following:
private static String encrypt(String property) throws GeneralSecurityException {
SecretKeyFactory keyFactory = SecretKeyFactory.getInstance("PBEWithMD5AndDES");
SecretKey key = keyFactory.generateSecret(new PBEKeySpec(PASSWORD));
Cipher pbeCipher = Cipher.getInstance("PBEWithMD5AndDES");
pbeCipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key, new PBEParameterSpec(SALT, 20));
return base64Encode(pbeCipher.doFinal(property.getBytes()));
This works consistently across jvms / os / hw / etc.
Unfortunately, the original version was writing it to the db as strings and now, these can't be de-crypted as oracle returns different values from the column.
I was wondering whether there was any way of retrieving these values now.
Regards
V
Edited by: user10510492 on Sep 28, 2011 1:59 PM

Answer 1

You need to try to find out what characterset was originally used to create the strings, this was either specified explicitly in the code, or done with the default Java encoding for your platform. Unfortunately there still is potential for loss of information which might prevent you from correctly decrypting the string (eg, bytes not in the characterset might have been converted to a questionmark, ASCII controlcodes might have been converted to something safer by your database, etc).