Bouncy Castle (cryptography)
Bouncy Castle is a collection of APIs used for implementing cryptography in computer programs. It includes APIs for both the Java and the C# programming languages. The APIs are supported by a registered Australian charitable organization: Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.
Bouncy Castle is Australian in origin and therefore American restrictions on the export of [cryptography from the United States] do not apply to it.
History
Bouncy Castle started when two colleagues were tired of having to re-invent a set of cryptography libraries each time they changed jobs working in server-side Java SE. One of the developers was active in Java ME development as a hobby and a design consideration was to include the greatest range of Java VMs for the library, including those on J2ME. This design consideration led to the architecture that exists in Bouncy Castle.The project, founded in May 2000, was originally written in Java only, but added a C# API in 2004. The original Java API consisted of approximately 27,000 lines of code, including test code and provided support for J2ME, a JCE/JCA provider, and basic X.509 certificate generation. In comparison, the 1.53 release consists of 390,640 lines of code, including test code. It supports the same functionality as the original release with a larger number of algorithms, plus PKCS#10, PKCS#12, CMS, S/MIME, OpenPGP, DTLS, TLS, OCSP, TSP, CMP, CRMF, DVCS, DANE, EST and Attribute Certificates. The C# API is around 145,000 lines of code and supports most of what the Java API does.
Some key properties of the project are:
- Strong emphasis on standards compliance and adaptability.
- Public support facilities include an issue tracker, dev mailing list and a wiki all available on the website.
- Commercial support provided under resources for the relevant API listed on the Bouncy Castle website
Architecture
The Bouncy Castle architecture consists of two main components that support the base cryptographic capabilities. These are known as the 'light-weight' API, and the Java Cryptography Extension provider. Further components built upon the JCE provider support additional functionality, such as PGP support, S/MIME, etc.The low-level, or 'light-weight', API is a set of APIs that implement all the underlying cryptographic algorithms. The APIs were designed to be simple enough to use if needed, but provided the basic building blocks for the JCE provider. The intent is to use the low-level API in memory constrained devices or when easy access to the JCE libraries is not possible. As the light-weight API is just Java code, the Java virtual machine does not impose any restrictions on the operation of the code, and at early times of the Bouncy Castle history it was the only way to develop strong cryptography that was not crippled by the Jurisdiction Policy files that prevented JCE providers from performing "strong" encryption.
The JCE-compatible provider is built upon the low-level APIs. As such, the source code for the JCE provider is an example of how to implement many of the "common" crypto problems using the low-level API. Many projects have been built using the JCE provider, including an Open Source Certificate Authority EJBCA.