Hi Zaid,
you should probably start reading about encryption in general. From your
description, I am uncertain whether you know the difference between
Symmetric and Asymmetric Cryptography. The Wikipedia is a good start:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography#Modern_cryptography>. You do
not have to know the math behind cryptography if you just want to use
cryptography, but you should know the use cases of the different
technologies.
Once you have got an overview, you should find out, how PGP implements
Cryptography. I believe you should not start programming right away,
instead you should play around with GPG or the like. Encrypt and decrypt
some files, change the password on your PGP key, export keys and import
them on another machine or into another keyring. You can find details
about the PGP protocol in RFC 4880.
After you know how to use GPG, it will be less difficult to understand
the Bouncy Castle Crypto API :-).
There is another popular cryptography protocol, defined by standards
X.509, PKIX, S/MIME and PKCS. Maybe these are an alternative to PGP.
Bouncy Castle supports both, but I think X.509 has better support in
general. Java and C# offer native methods to process those and most
operating systems have some kind of support for X.509. X.509 is also
used for TLS (e.g. HTTPS). PGP is probably sufficient to achive your
goal, though, so this is for bonus ;-).
Good luck and best wishes,
Christoph
On 19.09.2012 02:30, Muhd Zaid wrote:
Hi,
I'm relatively new to encryption and quite frankly I'm lost. Let me
try to explain my use case properly..
I need an API that can run both on the client side and the server
side. It needs to be able to send 128 bit PGP encrypted xml files to
and from the game client and the game server.
I've considered looking at the c# implementation of bouncy castle's
API since it could easily allow me to make an api that could run as a
plugin in-game as well as a standalone program server side.
However its sheer size and the lack of good documentation have put me
at a loss.
I’ve been following examples from this site
http://ledwith.org/2009/08/pgp-decryption-with-c/ but I keep getting
the exception “can’t find signing key in key ring”. I’m generating my
keys with gpgtools a
gnuPG implementation for mac. Quite frankly I don’t know where to
start to isolate the problem.
As this is my 1st task as a junior programmer at my company, ideally I
would like to be able to roll out my own solution for this API but
bouncy’s API is so huge and add to the fact I have no encryption
experience or background I’m at a loss. I’d be nice if anyone could
also highlight the classes that I need to zoom in for use...
A little background about myself, I’m CS bachelor but I majored in
game development so I know how to code, I’m just lost with how to
approach this problem and use bouncy’s API for PGP.
Thanks in advance,
Zaid
