A Java cryptography service provider implementing one-time pad

Abstract

Security is a challenging aspect of communications today that touches many areas including memory space, processing speed, code development and maintenance issues. When it comes to dealing with lightweight computing devices, each of these problems is amplified. In an attempt to address some of these problems, Sun's Java 2 standard edition version 1.4 includes the Java cryptography architecture (JCA). The JCA provides a single encryption API for application developers within a framework where multiple service providers may implement different algorithms. To the extent possible application developers have available multiple encryption technologies through a framework of common classes, interfaces and methods. The one time pad encryption method is a simple and reliable cryptographic algorithm whose characteristics make it attractive for communication with limited computing devices. The major difficulty of the one-time pad is key distribution. In this paper, we present an implementation of one-time pad as a JCA service provider, and demonstrate its usefulness on Palm devices.