I looked at many of the samples for Elliptic curve (EC) encryption and was unable to find any information regarding using an Elliptic curve key to wrap an AES key similar to the RSA technique. Does the BouncyCastle API support using a generated EC pair of keys to wrap an AES key which would be used to encrypt a message?

I modified the TestECIES example to generate a 384-bit key which should be large enough to wrap a 256-bit AES key so it would seem hypothetically possible.

I think you've answered your own question. EC is more like BigInteger Diffie-Hellman than RSA, so agreement techniques like IES are required to exchange symmetric keys.

As of 1.48 BC supports IES with the generation of ephemeral keys, the best place to find examples of these in use is in the test code.

Regards,

David

Thanks for the clarification Dave. It appears after testing with the ECIES example and looking at the information in your book that the ECIES code integrates the symmetric key encryption such as AES and allows one to distribute the ECIES public key to others so that they could encrypt messages to the owner and the owner can decrypt with the ECIES private key.

Since the ECDH requires coding the key agreements for generating the shared symmetric key, does the ECIES technique handles it internally?