HMAC-SHA256 Algorithm for signature calculation

Question

I am trying to create a signature using the HMAC-SHA256 algorithm and this is my code. I am using US ASCII encoding.

final Charset asciiCs = Charset.forName(         


        

Answer 1

The answer that you got there is correct. One minor thing in the code above, you need to init(key) before you can call doFinal()

    final Charset charSet = Charset.forName("US-ASCII");
    final Mac sha256_HMAC = Mac.getInstance("HmacSHA256");

    final SecretKeySpec secret_key = new javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec(charSet.encode("key").array(), "HmacSHA256");
    try {
        sha256_HMAC.init(secret_key);
    } catch (InvalidKeyException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    ...

Answer 2

The 0x just denotes that the characters after it represent a hex string.

0x1A == 1Ah == 26 == 1A

So the 0x is just to clarify what format the output is in, no need to worry about it.

Answer 3

Java simple code to generate encoded(HMAC-x) signatures. (Tried using Java-8 and Eclipse)

import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.security.InvalidKeyException;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;

import javax.crypto.Mac;
import javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec;

import com.sun.org.apache.xml.internal.security.utils.Base64;

/**
 * Encryption class to show how to generate encoded(HMAC-x) signatures.
 * 
 */
public class Encryption {

    public static void main(String args[]) {

        String message = "This is my message.";
        String key = "your_key";
        String algorithm = "HmacMD5";  // OPTIONS= HmacSHA512, HmacSHA256, HmacSHA1, HmacMD5

        try {

            // 1. Get an algorithm instance.
            Mac sha256_hmac = Mac.getInstance(algorithm);

            // 2. Create secret key.
            SecretKeySpec secret_key = new SecretKeySpec(key.getBytes("UTF-8"), algorithm);

            // 3. Assign secret key algorithm.
            sha256_hmac.init(secret_key);

            // 4. Generate Base64 encoded cipher string.
            String hash = Base64.encode(sha256_hmac.doFinal(message.getBytes("UTF-8")));

            // You can use any other encoding format to get hash text in that encoding.
            System.out.println(hash);

            /**
             * Here are the outputs for given algorithms:-
             * 
             * HmacMD5 = hpytHW6XebJ/hNyJeX/A2w==
             * HmacSHA1 = CZbtauhnzKs+UkBmdC1ssoEqdOw=
             * HmacSHA256 =gCZJBUrp45o+Z5REzMwyJrdbRj8Rvfoy33ULZ1bySXM=
             * HmacSHA512 = OAqi5yEbt2lkwDuFlO6/4UU6XmU2JEDuZn6+1pY4xLAq/JJGSNfSy1if499coG1K2Nqz/yyAMKPIx9C91uLj+w==
             */

        } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();

        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();

        } catch (InvalidKeyException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();

        }

    }

}

NOTE: You can use any other Algorithms and can try generating HmacMD5, HmacSHA1, HmacSHA256, HmacSHA512 signatures.