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- All Superinterfaces:
- Destroyable,- Key,- Serializable
 - All Known Subinterfaces:
- PBEKey
 - All Known Implementing Classes:
- EncryptionKey,- KerberosKey,- SecretKeySpec
 
 public interface SecretKey extends Key, Destroyable A secret (symmetric) key. The purpose of this interface is to group (and provide type safety for) all secret key interfaces.Provider implementations of this interface must overwrite the equalsandhashCodemethods inherited fromObject, so that secret keys are compared based on their underlying key material and not based on reference. Implementations should override the defaultdestroyandisDestroyedmethods from theDestroyableinterface to enable sensitive key information to be destroyed, cleared, or in the case where such information is immutable, unreferenced. Finally, sinceSecretKeyisSerializable, implementations should also overrideObjectOutputStream.writeObject(java.lang.Object)to prevent keys that have been destroyed from being serialized.Keys that implement this interface return the string RAWas their encoding format (seegetFormat), and return the raw key bytes as the result of agetEncodedmethod call. (ThegetFormatandgetEncodedmethods are inherited from theKeyparent interface.)- Since:
- 1.4
- See Also:
- SecretKeyFactory,- Cipher
 
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Field SummaryFields Modifier and Type Field Description static longserialVersionUIDThe class fingerprint that is set to indicate serialization compatibility since J2SE 1.4.
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Method Summary- 
Methods declared in interface javax.security.auth.Destroyabledestroy, isDestroyed
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Methods declared in interface java.security.KeygetAlgorithm, getEncoded, getFormat
 
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Field Detail- 
serialVersionUIDstatic final long serialVersionUID The class fingerprint that is set to indicate serialization compatibility since J2SE 1.4.- See Also:
- Constant Field Values
 
 
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