How do I store and read PGP public keys as strings using Bouncycastle Java?

Question

I have been trying to create, encode, store, retrieve, and decode a Bouncy Castle PGP public key. I get what appears to be the wrong output and an EOFException when I try to read the key back in. The key will be stored in a database as a string. The original RSA encryption public key is extracted from the key ring as follows: ``` @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") public PGPPublicKey getPublicKey() { PGPPublicKey pk = null; Iterator<PGPPublicKey> it = publicKeyRing.getPublicKeys(); while (pk == null && it.hasNext()) { PGPPublicKey key = it.next(); if (key.isEncryptionKey()) { pk = key; } } return pk; } ``` It is encoded, ASCII armored, and stored as a string as follows: ``` PGPPublicKey contactPK = realContact.getPublicKey(); ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); ArmoredOutputStream armored = new ArmoredOutputStream(out); contactPK.encode(armored); armored.close(); publicKey = new String(out.toByteArray(), Charset.forName("US-ASCII")); ``` This gets me a PGP message blo…

Accepted Answer

I ran into this issue, and it turned out that the Public Key Ring was actually the public key itself. When I was running the iterator I was actually getting subkeys (which turns into that message block instead of the public key block). If I'm not explaining that well, check out this explanation.

Assuming `realContact` is a public key ring that only contains subkeys, you don't actually need to run it through `getPublicKey()`.

How do I store and read PGP public keys as strings using Bouncycastle Java?

Solution

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