All Known Subinterfaces:: AsymmetricKey, DHPrivateKey, DHPublicKey, DSAPrivateKey, DSAPublicKey, ECPrivateKey, ECPublicKey, EdECPrivateKey, EdECPublicKey, PrivateKey, PublicKey, RSAMultiPrimePrivateCrtKey, RSAPrivateCrtKey, RSAPrivateKey, RSAPublicKey, XECPrivateKey, XECPublicKey

All Known Implementing Classes:: EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo, KeyPair, PEM, PKCS8EncodedKeySpec, X509Certificate, X509CRL, X509EncodedKeySpec

public sealed interface BinaryEncodable permits AsymmetricKey, KeyPair, PKCS8EncodedKeySpec, X509EncodedKeySpec, EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo, X509Certificate, X509CRL, PEM (not exhaustive)

This interface identifies cryptographic objects that can be converted to and from standardized binary representations.

The APIs for cryptographic objects such as public keys, private keys, certificates, and certificate revocation lists all provide the means to convert their instances to and from standardized binary representations. Other kinds of cryptographic objects, such as certificate requests, have no corresponding API but can still be expressed as standardized binary representations. The BinaryEncodable interface allows APIs that operate on standardized binary representations, such as PEMEncoder and PEMDecoder, to process all kinds of cryptographic objects uniformly.

The permitted subtype PEM is notable for supporting the encoding and decoding of PEM text that represents cryptographic objects for which no API exists. In future releases, other permitted subtypes may be added to support the encoding and decoding of additional kinds of cryptographic objects as standardized binary representations.

The list of permitted subtypes shown after permits is not exhaustive. This means if application code switches over a BinaryEncodable value, the switch cannot be made exhaustive simply by providing a case label for every permitted subtype shown in the list; there also must be a default or case BinaryEncodable label to handle additional subtypes. This allows the list of permitted subtypes to change over time without causing pre-existing switches to fail because of an unrecognized subtype.

Since:

28

See Also:

Interface BinaryEncodable