Problem with the keytool in JDK 1.2 Beta 3

Thorsten Goeller (tgoeller@metafinanz.de)
Thu, 30 Jul 1998 14:33:01 +0200

From: "Thorsten Goeller" <tgoeller@metafinanz.de>
To: java-security@java.sun.com
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 14:33:01 +0200
Subject: Problem with the keytool in JDK 1.2 Beta 3

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

we have a problem with the keytool. We wanted to use an own provider with
the name "ElGamal".
This provider functions with all testprograms we have written. But not with
the keytool. The exception, we got:
java.lang.RuntimeException: internal error! unrecognized algorithm name:
ElGamal

Then we read in the book "Java Security", Scott Oaks, O'Reilly in the
Appendix A about the keytool:

-keyalg AlgorithmName
[...]For the default Sun security provider, the name must be DSA, which is
also the default value for this option. Despite the presence of this
option, you cannot really specify another algorithm name, nor, for that
matter, can you use a non-Sun DSA provider. Internally, keytool expects the
key generator to produce keys that belong to a specific class in the sun
package.

-sigalg signatureAlgorithm
[...]Like the key algorithm, this option is not particularly useful at
present, since you cannot use your own security provider classes to
implement the signature.

So far the comments in this book.

Now my question: when will own providers in the security tools be useable?

Thorsten Goeller, Metafinanz, Germany