Bouncy Castle : need of bcprov-jdk15 and bcprov-jdk16

Question

I can see bcprov-jdk15 as well as bcprov-jdk16 on my project path. Can there be a scenario where we need both ?

Answer 1

The 15 and 16 point to JRE 1.5 and 1.6 for compatibility. Your version is 1.46 at most because that's the latest version where the JDK 1.5 and 1.6 were targeted separately. The 1.46 version was created on February 2011. The current version is 1.60, July 2018.

So you do not need nor should want either of those jars. You probably want the latest, otherwise you may be behind with regard to security fixes. Note that you should do some testing to see if the latest version runs with your code and change your code if it doesn't. Generally Bouncy Castle libs are backwards compatible, but some components such as its own ASN.1 API have gone through some serious changes.

So you'd better use this one from the Maven repository or download the latest from the Bouncy Castle site itself. You should use the one with 15on, which is for all versions of Java equal or greater than 1.5 (on = onwards).

Storing these jars without their version number is of course ludicrous. If you need to rename .jar files just to make your code run then there are some issues that you need to address.