Re: PKCS7 support in JDK

Jan Luehe (luehe@laguna.eng.sun.com)
Mon, 21 Sep 1998 14:21:58 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Sangeeta:

> The sun.security pacakge in the JDK contains an implementation of the PKCS7,
but
> supports only SignedData type. Is there any plan to add EnvelopedData and
> EncryptedData types support ?

We have been thinking about this, but no plans have been made yet.
Those types probably would have to go into JCE 1.x.
We are also thinking of providing a PKCS extension package with
support for all the types defined in PKCS (and PKCS#7 in particular).

> I would like to extend the PKCS7 class to add this functionality myself. But
it is not
> straight-forward to extend this class. All the parsing of the signed data is
implemented
> as private to the class. To be able to provide a new class which can parse
signed/
> enveloped/encrypted data I will need to duplicate code from the PKCS7 class.
>
> Why was this class designed like this ??

That's a very legitimate question. (I was wondering that myself. :-) )
This class should have been made more modular.

I am afraid you have to duplicate code for now.

Jan