Good morning, all:

I have searched but I can't find an answer to what seems to be a pretty
common occurence.

Here's a quick overview.   I have a private key (let's say
"13CEF550A7DDFB343BCE6749A349BEF6"), which i have stored on our LINUX
server to encrypt a userID in a Perl script.   I now need to decrypt
that UserID using JAVA.  I am using AES encryption.

I found the following code:

  //create a key to be used
  keyGen =
createObject("java","javax.crypto.KeyGenerator").getInstance("AES");
  keyGen.init(128);
  myKey = keyGen.generateKey();

  //instantiate our crypto object
  cipher =
createObject("java","javax.crypto.Cipher").getInstance("AES");

  // encrypt the string
  cipher.init(cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, myKey);

This would be great, except I don't need to create the private key,
since I already have one.

When I change cipher.init(cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, myKey); to
cipher.init(cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, "13CEF550A7DDFB343BCE6749A349BEF6"); I
get an  error that the method init was not found.  It seems like init
doesn't like a raw string passed to it.  The variable myKey is of type
SecretKeySpec, so that's what init must be expecting.

My ultimate goal was to store the private key in a secured file and
read it into a variable, and then pass this variable to the init
method, but that doesn't look like it will work.

My question is, do I have to create a keystore and put my private key
into it?  or is there a way to Cast a string to an appropriate object?

I hope this makes sense; apologies if it doesn't.  Any references,
resources, links, war stories would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Kathryn