Truly a practical guide

books:


	• Java Cryptography Extensions: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) Jason Weiss Morgan Kaufmann, 2004 - 176 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Truly a practical guide

This book delivers on what it promises. A practical guide to implementations using the JCA and JCE. If you're a Java developer starting on projects that deal with certificates, keystores, encryption, digital signatures, tokens, digests, or hardware cryptographic devices (HSMs), then you need to read this book before you begin.

Jason covers the topics he sets out to cover. If your eyes glazed over at the JCA documentation describing EngineSPIs or at mathematical treatises on crypto algorithms, then this book is for you. He gets right to the meat of the matter, and the code is simple enough to follow without having an IDE running. There are only a few typographical flaws, and nothing that distracted from the concepts being explained.

The book walks you through the overall provider architecture, gives examples of provider selection and some key workaround information for some historical problems as the JCA and JCE were being developed, extended, and improved by Sun.

Straight-up crypto is covered with symmetric and asymmetric keys, the coverage of block and stream ciphers, and the importance of specifying chaining (EBC/CBC/etc.) and padding (PKCS1/PKCS5/etc.). Digests, HMACs, Password-based encryption (PBE) and digital certificates are covered, along with key exchange (DH), and key management in keystores. The extra depth the author gives on key management was quite welcome, and often ignored. Examples using the Java keytool utility will also be appreciated by the target audience.

In short, this book is going to be on my required reading list for the Java application developer generalist starting on projects that involve crypto or, in particular, certificates. In my case, I use hardware-based keystores, and this book makes it very easy for me to build a common understanding in explaining what we want our team to accomplish.

This book should take about a week to digest.

What you won't find in this book are recipes or procedures. It's a practical guide, and lives up to the title. This book won't be a help to people writing JCPs either -- it's clearly targeted at the application developer needing to do things like load a certificate, implement a 3DES encryption/decryption, generate keys, or make sure you're using the required JCP implementation for your project. It also won't explain the nuances of ECB and CBC, or Blowfish and AES. But it will give you a practical guide on their fundamental differences as to the impact they have on your development. All example code is in Java. It doesn't cover elliptical algorithms, but, after reading this book, you shouldn't have a problem with writing code that relies on a specific provider's features.

As for the price, quite reasonable, and very useful to pass along or lend to the newcomers to your team.

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For a long time, there has been a need for a practical, down-to-earth developers book for the Java Cryptography Extension. I am very happy to see there is now a book that can answer many of the technical questions that developers, managers, and researchers have about such a critical topic. I am sure that this book will contribute greatly to the success of securing Java applications and deployments for e-business. --Anthony Nadalin, Java Security Lead Architect, IBM

For many Java developers and software engineers, cryptography is an "on-demand" programming exercise, where cryptographic concepts are shelved until the next project requires renewed focus. But considerations for cryptography must be made early on in the design process and its imperative that developers know what kinds of solutions exist.

One of Javas solutions to help bridge the gap between academic research and real-world problem solving comes in the form of a well-defined architecture for implementing cryptographic solutions. However, to use the architecture and its extensions, it is important to recognize the pros and cons of different cryptographic algorithms and to know how to implement various devices like key agreements, digital signatures, and message digests, to name a few.

In Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE), cryptography is discussed at the level that developers need to know to work with the JCE and with their own applications but that doesnt overwhelm by packing in details unimportant to the busy professional. The JCE is explored using numerous code examples and instructional detail, with clearly presented sections on each aspect of the Java library. An online open-source cryptography toolkit and the code for all of the examples further reinforces the concepts covered within the book. No other resource presents so concisely or effectively the exact material needed to begin utilizing the JCE.

* Written by a seasoned veteran of both cryptography and server-side programming
* Covers the architecture of the JCE, symmetric ciphers, asymmetric ciphers, message digests, message authentication codes, digital signatures, and managing keys and certificates
* Includes a companion web site that contains the code for the examples in the book, open-source cryptographic toolkits, and further resources

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