Android: Encrypt a string with AES 256bit Encryption with iv and secret key

Question

SecureRandom random = new SecureRandom(); // quite heavy, look into a lighter method.

String stringToEncrypt = \"mypassword\";
byte[] realiv = new byte[16];
random.         


        

Answer 1

In general you don't need something that generates random numbers for an algorithm that has deterministic behavior. Furthermore, you don't need an IV when you are using ECB block mode, which is what Java defaults to. To be precise, Java defaults to "AES/ECB/PKCS5Padding" for in Cipher.getInstance("AES").

So you should be OK with code like this:

// lets use the actual key value instead of the platform specific character decoding
byte[] secret = Hex.decodeHex("25d6c7fe35b9979a161f2136cd13b0ff".toCharArray());

// that's fine
SecretKeySpec secretKey = new SecretKeySpec(secret, "AES");

// SecureRandom should either be slow or be implemented in hardware
SecureRandom random = new SecureRandom();

// first create the cipher
Cipher eCipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding");

// filled with 00h characters first, use Cipher instance so you can switch algorithms
byte[] realIV = new byte[eCipher.getBlockSize()];

// actually fill with random
random.nextBytes(realIV);

// MISSING: create IvParameterSpec
IvParameterSpec ivSpec = new IvParameterSpec(realIV);

// create the cipher using the IV
eCipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, secretKey, ivSpec);

// NOTE: you should really not encrypt passwords for verification
String stringToEncrypt = "mypassword";

// convert to bytes first, but don't use the platform encoding
byte[] dataToEncrypt = stringToEncrypt.getBytes(Charset.forName("UTF-8"));

// actually do the encryption using the data
byte[] encryptedData = eCipher.doFinal(dataToEncrypt);

Now that looks a whole lot better. I've used the Apache commons codec for decoding the hexadecimal string.

Note that you need to save the realIV with the encryptedData, and that you haven't included integrity protection, e.g. a MAC (for passwords, you may not need that though).