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Marc Liyanage - Blog - Developer - OpenSSL, Public Key and PKI Crash Course, Part 1/4

OpenSSL, Public Key and PKI Crash Course, Part 1/4
Developer — 11 Jan 2009 18:21 — 81 days ago

At work I recently gave a presentation about the practical aspects of public key cryptography with the OpenSSL toolkit. I showed many openssl command line examples and when I was asked for a transcript I decided to expand the material and publish it here in the hope that it’s useful for others too.

If you see broken examples or broken English, please let me know.

Thanks to Kaspar Brand for reviewing the material and providing additional information and links.

There are four parts covering these major topics:

* Part 1: Public Key Cryptography
* Part 2: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
* Part 3: Inspecting and Creating X.509 Certificates
* Part 4: OpenSSL Bag of Tricks

This is part 1, about Public Key Cryptography. This part shows how to create RSA private and public keys and then use those keys to encrypt/decript and sign/verify information with openssl.

This assumes that you know what public key cryptography is about. If you don’t, read the Wikipedia article, especially the postal analogy. Wikipedia summarizes:

Public-key cryptography is a method for secret communication between two parties without requiring an initial exchange of secret keys. It can also be used to create digital signatures. Public key cryptography is a fundamental and widely used technology, and enables secure transmission of information on the Internet.

It is also known as asymmetric cryptography because the key used to encrypt a message differs from the key used to decrypt it. In public key cryptography, a user has a pair of cryptographic keys—a public key and a private key. The private key is kept secret, while the public key may be widely distributed. Messages are encrypted with the recipient's public key and can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. The keys are related mathematically, but the private key cannot be practically derived from the public key.

Creating Keys

So we need to create a key p

www.entropy.ch/...PKI-Crash-Course-Part-1-4.html - Preview

OpenSSL Encryption Private Key Public Key

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