Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Can some one help me understand how an RSA key literally is stored in these formats? From what I understand PEM is more human readable.
Sorry too many questions but fed up googling and getting vague answers. PKCS1 , available in several versions as rfcs and , is primarily about using the RSA algorithm for cryptography including encrypting decrypting signing and verifying. But since crypto is often used between systems or at least programs it is convenient to have a defined, interoperable format for keys, and PKCS1 defines fairly minimal formats for RSA public and private keys in appendix A.
As Luke implied this uses ASN. PKCS8 available as rfc on the other hand is a standard for handling private keys for all algorithms, not just RSA. It also uses ASN. PKCS8 also allows arbitrary 'attributes' to be added, but this is rarely used. Unable to convert. PKCS8 also provides an option to encrypt the private key, using password-based encryption in practice though not explicitly required. Since most systems today need to support multiple algorithms, and wish to be able to adapt to new algorithms as they are developed, PKCS8 is preferred for privatekeys, and a similar any-algorithm scheme defined by X.
Those are defined by other standards, including some other members of the PKCS series -- although they may use the keys defined by these standards. In those days email systems often could transmit, or at least reliably transmit, only printable text with a limited character set, and often only limited line length, so PEM encoded binary data as base64 with line length Nowadays email systems often can transmit binary data, but as Luke said copy-and-paste often can only handle displayed characters so PEM is still useful, and in addition easier for humans to recognize.
It is important to notice that the raw ASN. What this means is that a PKCS 8 object really is a wrapper around some other format. Note that this header does not specify the key type, since the encoded object turned to characters through Base64 already contains the information. As a further complication, PKCS 8 also defines an optional, often password-based encryption of private keys; and the traditional PEM-like format that OpenSSL implements also includes some generic support for password-based encryption; so you can have multiple combinations of wrappers that specify some kind of encryption, resulting in what can only be described as an utter mess.
Now what does this tells us about EC keys? However, if there is a standard somewhere that says how an EC private key can be turned into a sequence of bytes, then:. And this is exactly what happens. In SEC 1 section C. So an encoded private key contains the private key itself a integer in the Let's try it. Now my ec1. We recognize the expected ASN.
You will then get in file ec3. Now for some crypto there is both a regular version and an EC version. There is only RSA. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 6 years, 9 months ago. For more information read our Cookie and privacy statement.
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