In my Java based applications I usually have the need to encrypt a string before storing it somewhere. Most commonly, I need to encrypt user passwords and credit card information before storing it in a character field in the database. I don’t want people to be able to walk away with a cleartext list of passwords or credit card numbers just by doing a simple select. Instead they’ll have to work a little harder to decrypt the values stored in the database.

To do this, I wrote a very simple utility class that takes a String, runs it through a javax.crypto.Cipher object to DES encrypt it, and finally passes it through the Jakarta Commons Codec class which encodes the encrypted bytes into a Base64 (org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64) byte array. I wanted to encode the encrypted string in Base64 to ensure it only contains ASCII characters before storing it in my database. The decryption just follows the previous explanation in reverse: decode base 64, unencrypt string, return unencrypted string.

I will present my class below, complete with a main method showing how to use it. Before compiling the class, make sure you have downloaded the Jakarta Commons Codec library from http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_commons-codec.cgi. I downloaded the file labeled 1.3.zip Binary. Uncompress the zip file and put the commons codec jar file into your classpath. The name of the jar file in my example is commons-codec-1.3.jar. The Commons Codec jar file is what supports the Base 64 encryption and decryption.

And now I will present my utility class:
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