Practical Usage

Here are some practical tips you can use for your own applications.

Try to use JDK 1.4. This version of the JDK has the Java Cryptography Extensions built in and provides much more integrated support for cryptography than earlier versions. This translates into more algorithms being available for you to use.

When you’re working with XML Security, you’re working with namespace-aware XML applications. Be sure you’re using the namespace-aware versions of the methods from the DOM specification. You can look at the DOM Level 2 Core Recommendation to find out what these methods are.

Cryptography operations are computationally expensive. Although it may be more work for you as a developer to encrypt only portions of a document, you save a lot of CPU cycles. If you’re going to be processing a lot of documents or repeatedly processing documents, this can have a major impact on the usability of your system.

If you aren’t using XML Signature or XML Encryption in your applications, you should be aware of the issues that will come up when you incorporate these technologies. You’ll see the greatest effect in the design of your XML vocabularies. You should think about what information will need to be signed and/or encrypted and then put that information in independent elements, so you can sign or encrypt only the data that needs to be signed or encrypted.