Comparison with Previous Releases
Keys are present in Java 1.1 and the Java 2 platform, but much of the support for them that we’ve discussed here is only available in the Java 2 platform. Key factories and key specifications are only available in Java 2. In Java 1.1, you can get the encoded key data directly from a key, but that’s a one-way operation; there’s no practical way to import a key in Java 1.1.
In Java 1.1, the KeyPairGenerator class extends
only the Object class; in Java 2, this class
extends the KeyPairGeneratorSpi class. As is
usual with this architecture, some of the methods we used are methods
of the KeyPairGenerator class in Java 1.1 and
methods of the KeyPairGeneratorSpi class in 1.2;
for the developer, the end result is the same.
Java 1.1 only supports DSA keys. The RSA-based key interfaces were introduced in Java 2, version 1.2. However, there is no standard security provider in that release that implements RSA keys; only the security providers that come in Java 2, version 1.3 and with JSSE provide an RSA implementation.
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