PKCS12 - Different resutls on JDK1.4 and JDK 1.5 and above

Question

Hi guys, i've recieved a PKCS12 file which contains a certificate and private key that i am supposed to extract. As im new to certificates and the whole PKI infrastructure i attempted to write a small program to try and view the contents of the PKCS#12 file.
A password is required to retrieve the certificate and the private key from the pkcs12 file. A password was provided to me and the instructions state that the password is the MD5 hash of the password that was provided to me.
I am having two weid prolems with this implementation. If i run this class on a JDK1.5 VM the password is rejected with the following error.
java.io.IOException: Integrity check failed: java.io.IOException: getSecretKey failed: Password is not ASCII
        at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.PKCS12KeyStore.engineLoad(PKCS12KeyStore.java:1314)
        at java.security.KeyStore.load(KeyStore.java:1150)
        at pkcs12.Certificaten.extractKeys(Certificaten.java:44)
        at pkcs12.NewClass1.main(NewClass1.java:47)I am not sure why it is insisting that the password should be ASCII. Does anyone know why this is the case?
If i run the same class on JDK 1.4, i can open the PKCS12 file so the password is accepted. as shown below
Alias : 257811
Adding key for alias 257811
Private key
RSA
java.lang.ClassCastException
        at pkcs12.Certificaten.extractKeys(Certificaten.java:59)
        at pkcs12.NewClass1.main(NewClass1.java:47)
Exception in thread "main" The exception in 1.4 is to do with this line i think
cert =   (Certificate) myStore.getCertificate(strAlias);I havent found out the resolution to the above problem but im a bit worried on teh error if i ran it on 1.5. As i dont have control of the format of the password, i cant just change it to be an ASCII password. Is there a way i can get it to accept a non-ascii password?
Here are the classes i used to test the above.
public class NewClass1 {
    public static byte[] MD5(byte[] bytes) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException{
          MessageDigest md;
          md = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
          byte[] md5hash = new byte[8];
          md.update(bytes);
          md5hash = md.digest();
          return md5hash;
    public static void main(String[] main) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, UnsupportedEncodingException, IOException, Exception{
        byte[] originalStringInBytes = "Baltimore1,".getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
        byte[] md5;
        md5 = MD5(originalStringInBytes);
        System.out.println(md5);       
        String tstString = new String(md5,"ISO-8859-1");
        System.out.println(tstString);
        Certificaten newCert = new Certificaten("E:\\Documents and Settings\\ziggy\\My Documents\\NetBeansProjects\\PKCS12\\src\\pkcs12\\257811.p12");
        newCert.extractKeys(tstString);                    
}I used this class written by somebody else to extract the keys
public class Certificaten {
    private FileInputStream in_cert = null;
//private InputStream cert = null;
    private KeyStore myStore = null;
    private PrivateKey kr = null;
    private PublicKey ku = null;
    private java.security.Certificate cert = null;
    Enumeration eAliases = null;
//constructors
    public Certificaten() //default constructor
    public Certificaten(String certPath) //overloaded constructor
        try {
            in_cert = new FileInputStream(certPath);
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
    public void extractKeys(String passw) throws Exception {
        try {
            myStore = KeyStore.getInstance("PKCS12");
            myStore.load(in_cert, passw.toCharArray());
            eAliases = myStore.aliases();
            while (eAliases.hasMoreElements()) {
                String strAlias = (String) eAliases.nextElement();
                System.out.println("Alias : " + strAlias);
                if (myStore.isKeyEntry(strAlias)) {
                    System.out.println("Adding key for alias " + strAlias);
// retrieve private key from PKCS12 certificate
                    kr = (PrivateKey) myStore.getKey(strAlias,
                            passw.toCharArray());
                    System.out.println("Private key");
                    System.out.println(kr.getAlgorithm());
//check for occurence of error!!
                    if (kr == null) {                       
                    cert =   (Certificate) myStore.getCertificate(strAlias);
//check for occurence of error!!
                    if (cert == null) {
//retrieve public key from certificate
                    ku = cert.getPublicKey();
                    System.out.println(ku.getAlgorithm());
//check for occurence of error!!
                    if (ku == null) {
        } catch (KeyStoreException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (CertificateException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (UnrecoverableKeyException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
    public PrivateKey getPrivateKey() {
        return kr;
    public PublicKey getPublicKey() {
        return ku;
    }

Answer 1

Dude - instead of posting something, and then editing it like eleventy-bajillion-thousand times afterwards,
why don't you click the "preview" tab and look over it, before clicking the "post" button? eh?