I do not know how to decrypt

[Anthony Smith]

I have my key and the info that I need to decrypt. In my code they both will be accessed or handed off to me as Strings. How in the world do I decrypt it?
//key is my key
//s is the string I need to decrypt
SecretKey secretKey = keyFactory.generateSecret(key);
Cipher desCipher = Cipher.getInstance("DES/ECB/PKCS5Padding");
desCipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, secretKey);
byte[] cleartext = desCipher.doFinal(s.getBytes());
String ret = new String(cleartext);
Is that anywhere close?

[yaoheng zhang]

reinit the cipher with cipher.DECRYPT_MODE as parameter

[Jon Eaves]

Don't ever, ever, ever convert encrypted data to a String. Encrypted data _isn't_ a bunch of characters, they are "random numbers" which cannot be converted to a text representation.

If you want to use it as a "string" then uuencode or base64 encode the data first.