# Re: JCE and CryptoAPI 2.0

Marianne Mueller (Marianne.Mueller@Eng)
Tue, 23 Jun 1998 18:39:17 -0700 (PDT)

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    Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 18:39:17 -0700 (PDT)

    From: Marianne Mueller <Marianne.Mueller@Eng>

    Subject: Re: JCE and CryptoAPI 2.0

    To: java-security@web4.javasoft.com, mmstewar@ingr.com

> Does anyone know if you implement a JAVA client with JCE, can you talk with
> a server implemented in CryptoAPI 2.0?

What do you mean by "talk with"? As far as I understand, CryptoAPI is a C
language interface. I don't know if CryptoAPI supports anything similar to RMI,
remote procedure call, or if there is a web server that connects to CryptoAPI.

That is, I don't know if it's possible to make a remote call into CryptoAPI.

I would be surprised if you could do so directly, since for a Java API to
call a C API, you have to introduce a native code layer. The standard
Java API for that is called JNI, Java Native Interface, and that is one
of the Java interfaces that Microsoft is not supporting.

What you could do is write your own Java server-side application that calls
into the CryptoAPI, and then you could make calls to your Java application
from your Java client.

In general, you don't really have two libraries (a CryptoAPI implementation
and a JCE implementation) talking to each other, but, you have some
server application that uses CryptoAPI talking to some client application
that uses JCE. That's certainly do-able. If you wanted the server and
client to cooperate on crypto activities, that might be possible, or it
might not be possible, depending on what you wanted to do, and what is
supported by the CryptoAPI. I suspect the server and client could only
cooperate on the highest level activities, or, on the simplest activities.
If you wanted the server and client to cooperate on setting up an
encrypted transport, I doubt that would be possible.

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