How can I get a PublicKey object from EC public key bytes?

Question

I am developing an application that needs to validate SHA256withECDSAsignatures with the help of secp256r1 (NIST P-256, P-256, prime256v1) public keys.

The public keys are generated by a different application at some earlier point in time and stored in my database in hex encoding. The format of the hex string here is equivalent to the hex string OpenSSL would generate when calling openssl ec -in x.pem -noout -text on a file x.pem that has previously been generated by openssl ecparam -genkey -name secp256r1 -out x.pem. The message and signature are received from a different application. Consider the following test data:

// Stored in Database
byte[] pubKey = DatatypeConverter.parseHexBinary("049a55ad1e210cd113457ccd3465b930c9e7ade5e760ef64b63142dad43a308ed08e2d85632e8ff0322d3c7fda14409eafdc4c5b8ee0882fe885c92e3789c36a7a");

// Received from Other Application
byte[] message = DatatypeConverter.parseHexBinary("54686973206973206a75737420736f6d6520706f696e746c6573732064756d6d7920737472696e672e205468616e6b7320616e7977617920666f722074616b696e67207468652074696d6520746f206465636f6465206974203b2d29");
byte[] signature = DatatypeConverter.parseHexBinary("304402205fef461a4714a18a5ca6dce6d5ab8604f09f3899313a28ab430eb9860f8be9d602203c8d36446be85383af3f2e8630f40c4172543322b5e8973e03fff2309755e654");

Now this should be a valid signature.

My objective is to validate the signature over the message using the Java and/or Bouncycastle crypto API. I have created a method isValidSignaturefor that:

private static boolean isValidSignature(byte[] pubKey, byte[] message,
        byte[] signature) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, NoSuchProviderException, InvalidKeyException, SignatureException, InvalidKeySpecException {
    Signature ecdsaVerify = Signature.getInstance("SHA256withECDSA", new BouncyCastleProvider());
    ecdsaVerify.initVerify(getPublicKeyFromHex(pubKey));
    ecdsaVerify.update(message);
    return ecdsaVerify.verify(signature);
}

I have tried to extract the public key:

KeyFactory.generatePublic:

private static PublicKey getPublicKeyFromHex(byte[] pubKey) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, NoSuchProviderException, InvalidKeySpecException {
    KeyFactory fact = KeyFactory.getInstance("ECDSA", new BouncyCastleProvider());
    return fact.generatePublic(new X509EncodedKeySpec(pubKey));
}

But this throws a java.security.spec.InvalidKeySpecException (DER length more than 4 bytes: 26). What can I do to parse this?

Answer 1

The Bouncy Castle example code on elliptic curve key pair Generation and key factories got me pretty close.

Once I managed to create a ECDSA key factory and a curve specification for the secp256r1/NIST P-256/P-256/prime256v1 curve I was able to use ECPointUtil.decodePoint to obtain a curve point. I could then generate a public key specification that enabled me to generate a public key like this:

private PublicKey getPublicKeyFromBytes(byte[] pubKey) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, InvalidKeySpecException {
    ECNamedCurveParameterSpec spec = ECNamedCurveTable.getParameterSpec("prime256v1");
    KeyFactory kf = KeyFactory.getInstance("ECDSA", new BouncyCastleProvider());
    ECNamedCurveSpec params = new ECNamedCurveSpec("prime256v1", spec.getCurve(), spec.getG(), spec.getN());
    ECPoint point =  ECPointUtil.decodePoint(params.getCurve(), pubKey);
    ECPublicKeySpec pubKeySpec = new ECPublicKeySpec(point, params);
    ECPublicKey pk = (ECPublicKey) kf.generatePublic(pubKeySpec);
    return pk;
}