Securing ECC Private keys

Question

What would be the equivalent to securing ECC private key similar to how RSA private keys are password protected through the PKCS#12 format?

Another question I have is: how do I add ECC keys to a keystore such as JKS or BKS, or is there a mechanism to maintain ECC private securely on the server and password protected copies that can be used for exchange of keys with party I am working.

Basically I want to decrypt using ECIES and I plan to use Flexiprovider in a webservice hosted on an Ubuntu 14.04 server, running Apache Tomcat 8.0.15. The webservice would basically decrypt and do additional processing..

So am I storing and loading keys in my webservice from the keystore? What is the recommended approach?

Thanks and really appreciate detailed response since I am just getting started on encryption / decryption using ECIES..

Answer 1

PKCS#12 uses a generic and standard format for privatekey entries (PKCS#8) which supports ECC as well as RSA and other algorithms, so for software that supports ECC in the first place, the equivalent of PKCS#12 is PKCS#12. PKCS#12 is a good solution for password-protected transfer as well as storage. Formally PKCS#12 can be used with no password, but neither Java JCE nor any other software I know of supports it. However nothing prevents you from using a weak password; if you want actual security, choose the password(s) well.

JKS also uses a generic format for privatekey, but (IME) the password "protection" can be provider dependent. If your JVM/JRE uses any ECC provider you can create a privatekey (with at least dummy cert, and preferably real cert chain) in JKS, or import a privatekey (with cert chain) from PKCS#12 to JKS, with standard keytool. However, if your application uses a different ECC provider, namely flexiprovider, it may fail to use that key. If so or to be safe, create or import with keytool specifying the particular provider here flexiprovider.

Note you can never have a privatekey alone in a JKS, it must have some kind of cert chain, even it's a dummy selfsigned cert that nobody trusts. Of course for an asymmetric key to be actually useful for securing data it needs adequate integrity assurance, like a PKI certificate or PGP-style web-of-trust. FWIW, JKS also uses a generic format for certificates, namely X.509.

AFAIK BKS is custom to bouncycastle and only supported by the bouncycastle provider. I expect you probably can't use BKS with flexiprovider for any privatekey (and maybe not even cert), although it wouldn't hurt to test. However the bouncycastle provider is documented to support ECIES, so you should be able to use BC for ECIES with the privatekey in BKS.