Making a public key file in Go
I saw yesterday that the kinds of file that OpenSSL uses - private and public keys, certificates, and so on - are not as opaque as they might look. Two important formats used are PEM and ASN.1. ASN.1 is a bit like protobuf, with a binary encoding called DER. PEM “wraps” this binary encoding to produce an ASCII file.
These two formats are available in the Go standard library as encoding/pem and encoding/asn1.
With these, we can make files interoperable with OpenSSL.
For example, let’s make a public key file:
package main
import "os"
import "encoding/pem"
import "encoding/asn1"
import "math/big"
func main() {
var publicKey struct { Modulus *big.Int; Exponent int; }
publicKey.Modulus = big.NewInt(0)
publicKey.Modulus.SetString("C3E448D29FCDB2F7E52ABD17712AC76E4ABD66D54F2EF182DC4562B3FA240E3FF76658E7324E441E2C16628C703FF9DEFC76006278B35E21D890E5C2225BCD5B", 16)
publicKey.Exponent = 0x010001
asn1Bytes, _ := asn1.Marshal(publicKey)
file, _ := os.Create("public_key.pem")
pem.Encode(file, &pem.Block{ Type: "RSA PUBLIC KEY", Bytes: asn1Bytes })
file.Close()
}
The above makes a public_key.pem
which follows the PKCS#1 format for public keys,
defined as:
RSAPublicKey ::= SEQUENCE {
modulus INTEGER, -- n
publicExponent INTEGER -- e
}
We can use this
Tagged . All content copyright James Fisher 2017. This post is not associated with my employer.
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