Hello,
I want to generate ECDSA key pair on HSM (nCipher's netHSM) using SunPKCS11 provider and Java 6.
After generation for all supported curve names (e.g. secp256r1) I try to call getEncoding method from PublicKey object (keyPair.getPublic().getEncoded()) and
I get RuntimeException
caused by java.io.IOException: "Point does not match field size"

at sun.security.ec.ECParameters.decodePoint(ECParameters.java:75)
at sun.security.pkcs11.P11ECKeyFactory.decodePoint(P11ECKeyFactory.java:61)
at sun.security.pkcs11.P11Key$P11ECPublicKey.fetchValues(P11Key.java:1002)

Keys are accessible on HSM.
Everything is well configured and works fine with RSA keys.

Using IAIK PKCS#11 provider I got proper values. Is it any bug in SunPKCS11 provider?

Regards,
MarcinP

 

 

I recently had a problem with ECDSA and the PKCS#11 library of nCipher. Here's info from one of their engineers about the PKCS11 library:
"There are two separate issues - one is that our current pkcs11
release doesn't support ECDSA signature with SHA-2 hashes
(the v11.00 firmware adds support for it, but the main release version of
the pkcs11 library hasn't been updated to take advantage of it yet).

There is a hotfix version that does support SHA-2 hashes with some
restrictions, talk to support@ncipher.com for details, and V11.10
should be out soon and have that merged in.

But the issue with setting CKA_SIGN is that our underlying HSM API
allows elliptic curve keys to be either key exchange (ECDH) or
signature (ECDSA) keys, but not both at one.

At the PKCS #11 level, if you specify CKA_DERIVE=true and let
CKA_SIGN default, it will default to false, and vice versa.
If you specify both CKA_DERIVE=true and CKA_SIGN=true, then we
return CKR_TEMPLATE_INCONSISTENT because we can't do both with
the same key. (However, the tests using C_GetMechanismInfo will
show that we can do both mechanisms, because we can - so long
as you use different keys, even though they have the same PKCS#11
type.)

I can't comment on when or how that will be changed."

I was using the PKCS#11 library through NSS when I ran into the problem, but I imagine Java would run into similar problems also using the PKCS#11 library. I was able to generate keypairs but not create a CSR (which required making a signature, which required SHA-2).

Can you just use the java classes to speak to the netHSM? I've never directly written code to do so myself, but I have used Corestreet's OCSP product that uses the java classes to speak to the nCipher HSMs (though not using EC). It might work better than going through the PKCS#11 layer. There should be a java directory under NFAST_HOME that contains some jars.

Please post back if you figure anything out as I'll probably be playing with this stuff myself soon.

Dave