Is this Java encryption code thread safe?

Question

I want to use the following code for a high-concurrency application where certain data must be encrypted and decrypted. So I need to know what part of this code should be synchronized, if any, to avoid unpredictable issues.

public class DesEncrypter {
    Cipher ecipher;
    Cipher dcipher;

    // 8-byte Salt
    byte[] salt = {
        (byte)0xA9, (byte)0x9B, (byte)0xC8, (byte)0x32,
        (byte)0x56, (byte)0x35, (byte)0xE3, (byte)0x03
    };

    int iterationCount = 19;

    DesEncrypter(String passPhrase) {
        try {
            // Create the key
            KeySpec keySpec = new PBEKeySpec(passPhrase.toCharArray(), salt, iterationCount);

            SecretKey key = SecretKeyFactory.getInstance( "PBEWithMD5AndDES").generateSecret(keySpec);
            ecipher = Cipher.getInstance(key.getAlgorithm());
            dcipher = Cipher.getInstance(key.getAlgorithm());

            // Prepare the parameter to the ciphers
            AlgorithmParameterSpec paramSpec = new PBEParameterSpec(salt, iterationCount);

            // Create the ciphers
            ecipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key, paramSpec);
            dcipher.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, key, paramSpec);
        } catch (...)
    }

    public String encrypt(String str) {
        try {
            // Encode the string into bytes using utf-8
            byte[] utf8 = str.getBytes("UTF8");
            // Encrypt
            byte[] enc = ecipher.doFinal(utf8);
            // Encode bytes to base64 to get a string
            return new sun.misc.BASE64Encoder().encode(enc);

        } catch (...)
    }

    public String decrypt(String str) {
        try {
            // Decode base64 to get bytes
            byte[] dec = new sun.misc.BASE64Decoder().decodeBuffer(str);
            // Decrypt
            byte[] utf8 = dcipher.doFinal(dec);
            // Decode using utf-8
            return new String(utf8, "UTF8");
        } catch (...)
    }
}

If I create a new cipher in the encrypt() and decrypt() methods for each invocation, then I can avoid concurrency problems, I'm just not sure if there's a lot of overhead in getting a new instance of a cipher for each invocation.

   public String encrypt(String str) {
        try {
            // Encode the string into bytes using utf-8
            byte[] utf8 = str.getBytes("UTF8");
            // Encrypt
            //new cipher instance
            ecipher = Cipher.getInstance(key.getAlgorithm());

            byte[] enc = ecipher.doFinal(utf8);
            // Encode bytes to base64 to get a string
            return new sun.misc.BASE64Encoder().encode(enc);

        } catch (...)

Answer 1

The Cipher object is not going to be thread-safe, because it retains internal state about the encryption process. That applies to your DesEncrypter class as well - each thread will need to use its own instance of DesEncrypter, unless you synchonize the encode and decode methods.