Bouncy Castle Providers

BouncyCastle Introduce

Bouncy Castle is a Java library that complements the default Java Cryptographic Extension (JCE), and it provides more cipher suites and algorithms than the default JCE provided by Sun.

In addition to that, Bouncy Castle has lots of utilities for reading arcane formats like PEM and ASN.1 that no sane person would want to rewrite themselves.

In Pulsar, security and crypto have dependencies on BouncyCastle Jars. For the detailed installing and configuring Bouncy Castle FIPS, see BC FIPS Documentation, especially the User Guides and Security Policy PDFs.

Bouncy Castle provides both FIPS and non-FIPS versions. But in a JVM, you can not include both of the 2 versions, and you need to exclude the current version before including the other.

In Pulsar, the security and crypto methods also depend on Bouncy Castle, especially in mTLS authentication and Transport Encryption. This document contains the configuration between BouncyCastle FIPS(BC-FIPS) and non-FIPS(BC-non-FIPS) version while using Pulsar.

How BouncyCastle modules packaged in Pulsar

In Pulsar’s bouncy-castle module, We provide 2 sub modules: bouncy-castle-bc(for non-FIPS versions) and bouncy-castle-bcfips(for FIPS version), to package BC jars together to make the include and exclude of Bouncy Castle easier.

To achieve this goal, we will need to package several bouncy-castle jars together into bouncy-castle-bc or bouncy-castle-bcfips jar. Each of the original bouncy-castle jars is related to security, so BouncyCastle dutifully supplies signed of each jar. But when we do the re-package, Maven shade explodes the BouncyCastle jar file which puts the signatures into META-INF, these signatures aren’t valid for this new, uber-jar (signatures are only for the original BC jar). Usually, You will meet error like java.lang.SecurityException: Invalid signature file digest for Manifest main attributes.

You can exclude these signatures in the mvn pom file to avoid the above error.

<exclude>META-INF/*.SF</exclude>
<exclude>META-INF/*.DSA</exclude>
<exclude>META-INF/*.RSA</exclude>

But it can also lead to new, cryptic errors, e.g. java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException: PBEWithSHA256And256BitAES-CBC-BC SecretKeyFactory not available By explicitly specifying where to find the algorithm like this: SecretKeyFactory.getInstance("PBEWithSHA256And256BitAES-CBC-BC","BC") It will get the real error: java.security.NoSuchProviderException: JCE cannot authenticate the provider BC

So, we used a executable packer plugin that uses a jar-in-jar approach to preserve the BouncyCastle signature in a single, executable jar.

Include dependencies of BC-non-FIPS

Pulsar module bouncy-castle-bc, which is defined by bouncy-castle/bc/pom.xml contains the needed non-FIPS jars for Pulsar, and packaged as a jar-in-jar(need to provide <classifier>pkg</classifier>).

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.bouncycastle</groupId>
  <artifactId>bcpkix-jdk15on</artifactId>
  <version>${bouncycastle.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.bouncycastle</groupId>
  <artifactId>bcprov-ext-jdk15on</artifactId>
  <version>${bouncycastle.version}</version>
</dependency>

By using this bouncy-castle-bc module, you can easily include and exclude BouncyCastle non-FIPS jars.

Modules that include BC-non-FIPS module (bouncy-castle-bc)

For Pulsar client, user need the bouncy-castle module, so pulsar-client-original will include the bouncy-castle-bc module, and have <classifier>pkg</classifier> set to reference the jar-in-jar package. It is included as the following example:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.pulsar</groupId>
  <artifactId>bouncy-castle-bc</artifactId>
  <version>${pulsar.version}</version>
  <classifier>pkg</classifier>
</dependency>

By default bouncy-castle-bc already included in pulsar-client-original, And pulsar-client-original has been included in a lot of other modules like pulsar-client-admin, pulsar-broker. But for the above shaded jar and signatures reason, we should not package Pulsar’s bouncy-castle module into pulsar-client-all other shaded modules directly, such as pulsar-client-shaded, pulsar-client-admin-shaded and pulsar-broker-shaded. So in the shaded modules, we will exclude the bouncy-castle modules.

<filters>
  <filter>
    <artifact>org.apache.pulsar:pulsar-client-original</artifact>
    <includes>
      <include>**</include>
    </includes>
    <excludes>
      <exclude>org/bouncycastle/**</exclude>
    </excludes>
  </filter>
</filters>

That means, bouncy-castle related jars are not shaded in these fat jars.

Module BC-FIPS (bouncy-castle-bcfips)

Pulsar module bouncy-castle-bcfips, which is defined by bouncy-castle/bcfips/pom.xml, contains the needed FIPS jars for Pulsar. Similar to bouncy-castle-bc, bouncy-castle-bcfips is also packaged as a jar-in-jar package for easy include/exclude.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.bouncycastle</groupId>
  <artifactId>bc-fips</artifactId>
  <version>${bouncycastle.bc-fips.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.bouncycastle</groupId>
  <artifactId>bcpkix-fips</artifactId>
  <version>${bouncycastle.bcpkix-fips.version}</version>
</dependency>

Exclude BC-non-FIPS and include BC-FIPS

If you want to switch from BC-non-FIPS to BC-FIPS version, Here is an example for pulsar-broker module:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.pulsar</groupId>
  <artifactId>pulsar-broker</artifactId>
  <version>${pulsar.version}</version>
  <exclusions>
    <exclusion>
      <groupId>org.apache.pulsar</groupId>
      <artifactId>bouncy-castle-bc</artifactId>
    </exclusion>
  </exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.pulsar</groupId>
  <artifactId>bouncy-castle-bcfips</artifactId>
  <version>${pulsar.version}</version>
  <classifier>pkg</classifier>
</dependency>

For more example, you can reference module bcfips-include-test.