Java 256-bit AES Password-Based Encryption

Question

I need to implement 256 bit AES encryption, but all the examples I have found online use a \"KeyGenerator\" to generate a 256 bit key, but I would like to use my own passkey

Answer 1

What I've done in the past is hash the key via something like SHA256, then extract the bytes from the hash into the key byte[].

After you have your byte[] you can simply do:

SecretKeySpec key = new SecretKeySpec(keyBytes, "AES");
Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES");
cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key);
byte[] encryptedBytes = cipher.doFinal(clearText.getBytes());