Encrypt in Ruby and Decrypt in Java - Why is it not working?

Question

What am I doing wrong? I expected the Java program to print \"private\". My goal is to try to write the MessageEncryptor.decrypt ruby method in Java.

Ruby encrypti

Answer 1

This is the problem - or at least a problem:

byte[] result = cipher.doFinal(encryptedData);
return result.toString();

You're calling toString() on a byte array. Arrays don't override toString(). That won't give you what you want at all - as you can see. Instead, you need to write something like:

return new String(result, "UTF-8");

... but you need to know what encoding was used to turn the original string into bytes before encryption. It's not clear to me from the Ruby code what encoding is used, but if you can be explicit about it (ideally using UTF-8) it'll make your life a lot easier.

In short, I suspect this problem has nothing to do with encryption at all - it has everything to do with converting text to bytes in Ruby and then converting the same sequence of bytes back into a string in Java.

Of course the encryption may be failing as well but that's a different matter.