Generating A New Private Key Android

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Jul 09, 2019  The Private Key is generated with your Certificate Signing Request (CSR). The CSR is submitted to the Certificate Authority right after you activate your Certificate. The Private Key must be kept safe and secret on your server or device, because later you’ll need it for Certificate installation. Stack Overflow for Teams is a private, secure spot for you and your coworkers to find and share information. Learn more How to generate release key in android.

While Encrypting a File with a Password from the Command Line using OpenSSLis very useful in its own right, the real power of the OpenSSL library is itsability to support the use of public key cryptograph for encrypting orvalidating data in an unattended manner (where the password is not required toencrypt) is done with public keys.

How do I Create a Self-Signed Certificate for an Android App? This lesson describes how to create a self-signed certificate for your Android application. Variations between Apple Mac and Windows are discussed and screen captures are provided. You might find some suggestions on-line but you might just have to generate a new key.

The Commands to Run

Generating A New Private Key Android

Generate a 2048 bit RSA Key

You can generate a public and private RSA key pair like this:

Advantages Of Private Key Encryption

openssl genrsa -des3 -out private.pem 2048

That generates a 2048-bit RSA key pair, encrypts them with a password you provideand writes them to a file. You need to next extract the public key file. You willuse this, for instance, on your web server to encrypt content so that it canonly be read with the private key.

Export the RSA Public Key to a File

This is a command that is

openssl rsa -in private.pem -outform PEM -pubout -out public.pem

The -pubout flag is really important. Be sure to include it.

Next open the public.pem and ensure that it starts with-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----. This is how you know that this file is thepublic key of the pair and not a private key.

To check the file from the command line you can use the less command, like this:

less public.pem

Do Not Run This, it Exports the Private Key

A previous version of the post gave this example in error.

openssl rsa -in private.pem -out private_unencrypted.pem -outform PEM

The error is that the -pubout was dropped from the end of the command.That changes the meaning of the command from that of exporting the public keyto exporting the private key outside of its encrypted wrapper. Inspecting theoutput file, in this case private_unencrypted.pem clearly shows that the keyis a RSA private key as it starts with -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----.

Visually Inspect Your Key Files

It is important to visually inspect you private and public key files to makesure that they are what you expect. OpenSSL will clearly explain the nature ofthe key block with a -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- or -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----.

You can use less to inspect each of your two files in turn:

  • less private.pem to verify that it starts with a -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
  • less public.pem to verify that it starts with a -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----

The next section shows a full example of what each key file should look like. https://evermicro730.weebly.com/blog/office-365-education-mac-download.

The Generated Key Files

The generated files are base64-encoded encryption keys in plain text format.If you select a password for your private key, its file will be encrypted withyour password. Be sure to remember this password or the key pair becomes useless.

The private.pem file looks something like this:

The public key, public.pem, file looks like:

Protecting Your Keys

Generating A New Private Key Android App

Depending on the nature of the information you will protect, it’s important tokeep the private key backed up and secret. The public key can be distributedanywhere or embedded in your web application scripts, such as in your PHP,Ruby, or other scripts. Again, backup your keys!

Remember, if the key goes away the data encrypted to it is gone. Keeping aprinted copy of the key material in a sealed envelope in a bank safety depositbox is a good way to protect important keys against loss due to fire or harddrive failure.

Oh, and one last thing.

If you, dear reader, were planning any funny business with the private key that I have just published here. Know that they were made especially for this series of blog posts. I do not use them for anything else.

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As a security measure, Android requires that apps be signed in order to be installed. Signing an app first requires creating keystores. A keystore is a storage mechanism for security certificates. A public key certificate is used to sign an APK before deployment to services like the Google Play Store. Signing the APK in this fashion allows Google to provide a high level of certainty that future updates to your APK of the same app come from you and not some malicious third party.

Considerations

Php artisan key generate base64. There are some things you will need to consider before first deploying your Android app. Primary among these is the expected lifespan of your app. You will not be able to deploy the same app signed by another key at any point in the near future. Android, as well as Google Play, enforces the use of the same key for updates to an APK. If you need to sign your app with another key for any reason, you will have to deploy the app with a new package name. Any ratings your app had on Google Play will be lost. You will also lose touch with your user base unless you have notified them in some way to expect the existing app to be obsolete.

Creating keystores

After you have decided on an app’s lifespan, you’ll want to generate your keystore. Java includes a tool for just this purpose: keytool. keytool is located in your Java JDK installation and should be on your path for the purposes of this article. keytool will quickly generate a public/private key pair and store them in a keystore for you after you answer a few simple questions.

keytool has a number of commands. The most common command used for signing Android builds -genkeypair, commonly abbreviated -genkey. The other commands may be useful to you, but uncommonly so. Again, there are lots of options for this keytool command. The primary -genkey options we are concerned with are in the table below with a brief description:

-keystore Filename of the generated keystore
-alias Keypair alias name
-keyalg Algorithm used to generate keypair
-keysize Keypair size, in bits
-validity Keypair validity duration, in days
Private

In other words, running the command

keytool -genkey -v -keystore release.keystore -alias example -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

would result in a keystore file called release.keystore which contained an RSA-2048 public/private keypair by the alias name of example and validity of 10,000 days (more than 27 years).

Before running this command, you’ll want to decide on strong passwords for the keystore and key. You’ll need both of these passwords to sign an APK — they can be the same password if you’re into that kind of thing. The tool will also collect some metadata like your name and organization, but all of that is optional.

Related: Backgrounding Instead of Finishing the Root Activity on Android

Signing your APK

  • Sign with Gradle

After running the command you’ll be the proud owner of a brand new Java Keystore. You probably want to set up your project to use the keystore to sign your APK, so let’s have a look at that.

If you’re using gradle to build your Android project, you will create a android.signingConfig and associate it with one or more android.buildTypes. The two passwords, keystore name, and alias name will all be needed in order to sign an APK. You can handle this in at least a few different ways. The simplest is to enter the relevant information directly into your gradle build script:

If you want to control access to the passwords you can move the information out of the build.gradle file and put it in your local environment or in a properties file to load at build time. To maintain security and control of the information, it’s likely that you would not want to check the keystore properties file into your source control.

Here is an example [from Google] of how to load the information from a file that would be located in your app’s root directory with the project level build.gradle file:

keystore.properties would contain (in this example):

If you prefer the environment variable method, create a script to add the variables to your environment and try something like this:

There are some trade-offs to both of these methods. Figure out what works best for your organization’s methodology and use that one. For the environment variable method, for example, you have to load these variables into your environment somehow. This is less than ideal if you want to generate a signed APK with Android Studio.

  • Sign manually

If you prefer to sign your APK manually instead of as part of the build process, you’ll want to use apksigner, located at {ANDROID_SDK_DIRECTORY}/build-tools/{BUILD_TOOLS_VERSION}/apksigner for build-tools revision 24.0.3 or higher. apksigner uses the public/private key pair stored in your app’s keystore to generate a public key certificate. apksigner then attaches that certificate to the APK. After this is accomplished, the APK is associated with that private key in a unique way. The Android gradle plugin will handle this for you if you configure your build.gradle file with all of the necessary information, as shown above.

Generating A New Private Key Android Phone

You’ll want to zipalign your APK, zipalign will ensure that your app’s uncompressed data starts at a predictable offset inside the APK. zipaligned APKs are required to publish to the Google Play store.

After your APK is zipaligned, sign it using apksigner:

You will be prompted at the command line to enter the password for your keystore.

If your keystore and key passwords differ, you’re in for a treat! Using the command above, you will be asked for the keystore password, but will not be asked for the key password. Entering either password results in exceptions and you won’t be having a good time. You’ll need to tell apksigner that you want to specify each password individually. Apparently, this is supposed to be the default behavior, but it hasn’t worked for me. To force apksigner to ask you for the keystore and key password independently, use the --ks-pass and --key-pass options. Following each option with stdin will tell apksigner to capture the password from you at the command line.

Generating A New Private Key Android Free

I hope this has educated you a bit more about how creating keystores and signing an Android APK works.

Public Private Key Encryption

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