Introduction

In the 21st Century, information is being exchanged electronically at an ever-increasing rate. Financial markets, commerce, and communication between citizens of all nations are utilizing the Internet and proprietary networks to exchange sensitive information. In pace with this trend are those rogue persons increasingly intercepting this information or supplanting it with misleading or erroneous messages. To continue effectively in this space Java developers should be aware and capable of building components and architecting systems based on a reliable technology that can fit within a secure environment. An available technology for securing facets of systems is Cryptography.

Background

Sun recognized that their Java programming language was being used to develop e-commerce systems. To address the requirement for secrecy they offered the JCE to the Java community as a downloadable API from their website. When Sun acknowledged that systems were increasingly using this API, they bundled it with the SDK in 2002.

The JCE is a pluggable technology. Sun defined the JCE interface but the technology is quite flexible; it allows different entities to provide its implementation. This facility was largely motivated by the fact that cryptographic products are under US federal export controls. The US government maintained that cryptography products are