How to sign string with private key

I guess what you say is you know the key pair before hand and want to sign/verify with that.

Please see the following code.

import java.security.KeyPair;
import java.security.KeyPairGenerator;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.security.Signature;

import sun.misc.BASE64Encoder;

public class MainClass {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        KeyPair keyPair = getKeyPair();

        byte[] data = "test".getBytes("UTF8");

        Signature sig = Signature.getInstance("SHA1WithRSA");
        sig.initSign(keyPair.getPrivate());
        sig.update(data);
        byte[] signatureBytes = sig.sign();
        System.out.println("Signature:" + new BASE64Encoder().encode(signatureBytes));

        sig.initVerify(keyPair.getPublic());
        sig.update(data);

        System.out.println(sig.verify(signatureBytes));
    }

    private static KeyPair getKeyPair() throws NoSuchAlgorithmException {
        KeyPairGenerator kpg = KeyPairGenerator.getInstance("RSA");
        kpg.initialize(1024);
        return kpg.genKeyPair();
    }
}

Here you need to change the method getKeyPair() to supply your known key pair. You may load it from a java key store [JKS].

You can’t just have an arbitrary byte array either as your public key or private key. They should be generated in relation.