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

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Making a public key file in Go

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