create an SSLContext instance using a Bouncy Castle provider

Question

I'm stuck at the creation of an SSLContext (which I want to use to instantiate an SSLEngine to handle encrypted transport via the java-nio):

The code

String protocol = "TLSv1.2";
Provider provider = new BouncyCastleProvider();
Security.addProvider(provider);
sslContext = SSLContext.getInstance(protocol,provider.getName());

throws the following exception:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException: no such algorithm: SSL for provider BC
at org.bitmash.network.tcp.ssl.SslTransferFactory.<init>(SslTransferFactory.java:43)
at org.bitmash.network.http.HttpsServer.<init>(HttpsServer.java:19)

I attached Bouncy Castle's current provider package 'bcprov-jdk15on-150.jar' (which I got from here) to the applications classpath as well as to its bootclasspath (via VM-Option -Xbootclasspath/p), but neither solved the problem. I also tried different values for protocol (i. e. 'SSL' and 'TLSv1') without any effect.

Also, I found people with similar problems here and here. But in contrast to them, I'm targeting (and I'm using) Java 7 (or greater), but I still have this problem. Is it -in general- even feasible to use Bouncy Castle this way, or do I have to rewrite my protocol using their respective API instead of oracle's NIO via SSLEngine (which is the way I'm doing it right now)?

Thank you so much for any help here.

Answer 1

I know this is kind of an old question, but I needed an answer (so I am creating one):

• [Is it possible to] create an SSLContext instance using a Bouncy Castle provider [?]
• No

Why not?

Debugging this line of code:

Provider [] providers = Security.getProviders();

• the default SunJSSE version 1.7 implements the following SSLContext values:

  Alg.Alias.SSLContext.SSL=TLSv1
  Alg.Alias.SSLContext.SSLv3=TLSv1
  SSLContext.Default=sun.security.ssl.SSLContextImpl$DefaultSSLContext
  SSLContext.TLSv1=sun.security.ssl.SSLContextImpl$TLS10Context
  SSLContext.TLSv1.1=sun.security.ssl.SSLContextImpl$TLS11Context
  SSLContext.TLSv1.2=sun.security.ssl.SSLContextImpl$TLS12Context
  

• using bcprov-jdk15on-152.jar and adding a new BouncyCastleProvider() to Security, one can observe that there are no SSLContext values available.

This should make sense since Bouncy Castle is a JCE implementation, not a JSSE implementation.