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.

public static String sign(String plainText, PrivateKey privateKey) throws Exception {
    Signature privateSignature = Signature.getInstance("SHA256withRSA");
    privateSignature.initSign(privateKey);
    privateSignature.update(plainText.getBytes(UTF_8));

    byte[] signature = privateSignature.sign();

    return Base64.getEncoder().encodeToString(signature);
}

public static boolean verify(String plainText, String signature, PublicKey publicKey) throws Exception {
    Signature publicSignature = Signature.getInstance("SHA256withRSA");
    publicSignature.initVerify(publicKey);
    publicSignature.update(plainText.getBytes(UTF_8));

    byte[] signatureBytes = Base64.getDecoder().decode(signature);

    return publicSignature.verify(signatureBytes);
}