I'm trying to understand what the Java java.security.Signature class does. If I compute an SHA1 message digest, and then encrypt that digest using RSA, I get a different result to asking the Signature class to sign the same thing:
// Generate new key
KeyPair keyPair = KeyPairGenerator.getInstance("RSA").generateKeyPair();
PrivateKey privateKey = keyPair.getPrivate();
String plaintext = "This is the message being signed";
// Compute signature
Signature instance = Signature.getInstance("SHA1withRSA");
instance.initSign(privateKey);
instance.update((plaintext).getBytes());
byte[] signature = instance.sign();
// Compute digest
MessageDigest sha1 = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA1");
byte[] digest = sha1.digest((plaintext).getBytes());
// Encrypt digest
Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("RSA");
cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, privateKey);
byte[] cipherText = cipher.doFinal(digest);
// Display results
System.out.println("Input data: " + plaintext);
System.out.println("Digest: " + bytes2String(digest));
System.out.println("Cipher text: " + bytes2String(cipherText));
System.out.println("Signature: " + bytes2String(signature));
Results in (for example):
Input data: This is the message being signed
Digest: 62b0a9ef15461c82766fb5bdaae9edbe4ac2e067
Cipher text: 057dc0d2f7f54acc95d3cf5cba9f944619394711003bdd12...
Signature: 7177c74bbbb871cc0af92e30d2808ebae146f25d3fd8ba1622...
I must have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Signature is doing - I've traced through it, and it appears to be calling update on a MessageDigest object, with the algorithm set to SHA1 as I would expect, then getting the digest, then doing the encryption. What's making the results differ?
EDIT:
Leonidas made me check whether the signature scheme is supposed to do what I think it does. There are two types of signature defined in the RFC:
The first of these (PKCS1) is the one I describe above. It uses a hash function to create a digest, and then encrypts the result with a private key.
The second algorithm uses a random salt value, and is more secure but non-deterministic. The signature produced from the code above does not change if the same key is used repeatedly, so I don't think it can be PSS.
EDIT:
Here's the bytes2string method I was using:
private static String bytes2String(byte[] bytes) {
StringBuilder string = new StringBuilder();
for (byte b : bytes) {
String hexString = Integer.toHexString(0x00FF & b);
string.append(hexString.length() == 1 ? "0" + hexString : hexString);
}
return string.toString();
}