Trying to verify a signature, Exception thrown: java.io.IOException: Sequence tag error

Question

I'm trying to verify the signature of a message, but I am getting the following exception being thrown.

Exception in thread "main" java.security.SignatureException: Signature encoding error
    at sun.security.rsa.RSASignature.engineVerify(RSASignature.java:185)
    at java.security.Signature$Delegate.engineVerify(Signature.java:1140)
    at java.security.Signature.verify(Signature.java:592)
    ... 4 more
Caused by: java.io.IOException: Sequence tag error
    at sun.security.util.DerInputStream.getSequence(DerInputStream.java:280)
    at sun.security.rsa.RSASignature.decodeSignature(RSASignature.java:209)
    at sun.security.rsa.RSASignature.engineVerify(RSASignature.java:174)
    ... 6 more

Here is my Java code

Signature sig = Signature.getInstance("SHA1withRSA");
sig.initVerify(publicKey);
sig.update(message);
return sig.verify(signature);

publicKey is an instance of JCERSAPublicKey

I read on this website that this error is being caused by the certificate missing the proper header and footer tags (i.e., -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and -----END CERTIFICATE-----). However, I am not using a certificate, but a public key. Looking at my public key PEM file, I can see it has the appropriate headers for a public key.

-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
...STUFF
...STUFF
...STUFF
...STUFF
...STUFF
...STUFF
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----

Yea, I figured that out, hence my solution below. Thanks for trying to help though. — John
– John, Commented Feb 17, 2011 at 15:15

John · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-16 05:39:01Z

2

A bit odd, because I thought this would have shipped with Java, but there was no Service Provider for the Signature Algorithm. I downloaded BouncyCastle and after adding it as a provider, the code no longer throws up an exception.

answered Feb 16, 2011 at 5:39

John

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4 Comments

President James K. Polk Over a year ago

Can't be, your changing multiple things at the same time and finally something worked so you attribute it to the last thing you did.

John Over a year ago

What? How did you come up with this idea: "your changing multiple things at the same time"?

James Over a year ago

Wouldn't that have thrown a "NoSuchAlgorithmException" instead?

Manuel Leduc Over a year ago

@John may you show us an example of the final code ? I'm particularly interested by the "adding it as a provider" part.

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