How Is The Private Key Generated

Posted : admin | On 11-05-2021

Your bitcoin private key is a randomly generated string (numbers and letters), allowing bitcoins to be spent. A private key is always mathematically related to the bitcoin wallet address, but is impossible to reverse engineer thanks to a strong encryption code base. Feb 26, 2018 What is a Private Key? A private key, is simply an extremely large and highly random number; The image below shows a Private Key generated by a wallet program written by me.

While Encrypting a File with a Password from the Command Line using OpenSSLis very useful in its own right, the real power of the OpenSSL library is itsability to support the use of public key cryptograph for encrypting orvalidating data in an unattended manner (where the password is not required toencrypt) is done with public keys.

The Commands to Run

Generate a 2048 bit RSA Key

The public key part is redirected to the file with the same name as the private key but with the.pub file extension. If the key has a password set, the password will be required to generate the public key. To check the details of the generated public key execute the following command as shown above. The private key for an SSL Certificate is something that is generated when you create a CSR. During the CSR creation process, the server will usually save the private key in one of its directories. During the CSR creation process, the server will usually save the private key in one of its directories. Generating a Secure Shell (SSH) Public/Private Key Pair Several tools exist to generate SSH public/private key pairs. The following sections show how to generate an SSH key pair on UNIX, UNIX-like and Windows platforms. It contains e (public exponent) so that public RSA key can be generated/extracted/derived from the private.pem private RSA key. The rest 5 components are there to speed up the decryption process. It turns out that by pre-computing and storing those 5 values it is possible to speed the RSA decryption by the factor of 4.

You can generate a public and private RSA key pair like this:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out private.pem 2048

That generates a 2048-bit RSA key pair, encrypts them with a password you provideand writes them to a file. You need to next extract the public key file. You willuse this, for instance, on your web server to encrypt content so that it canonly be read with the private key.

Export the RSA Public Key to a File

Ssl Generate Private Key

This is a command that is

openssl rsa -in private.pem -outform PEM -pubout -out public.pem

The -pubout flag is really important. Be sure to include it.

Next open the public.pem and ensure that it starts with-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----. This is how you know that this file is thepublic key of the pair and not a private key.

To check the file from the command line you can use the less command, like this:

less public.pem

Do Not Run This, it Exports the Private Key

A previous version of the post gave this example in error.

openssl rsa -in private.pem -out private_unencrypted.pem -outform PEM

The error is that the -pubout was dropped from the end of the command.That changes the meaning of the command from that of exporting the public keyto exporting the private key outside of its encrypted wrapper. Inspecting theoutput file, in this case private_unencrypted.pem clearly shows that the keyis a RSA private key as it starts with -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----.

Visually Inspect Your Key Files

It is important to visually inspect you private and public key files to makesure that they are what you expect. OpenSSL will clearly explain the nature ofthe key block with a -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- or -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----.

You can use less to inspect each of your two files in turn:

less private.pem to verify that it starts with a -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
less public.pem to verify that it starts with a -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----

The next section shows a full example of what each key file should look like.

The Generated Key Files

Public Private Key Encryption

The generated files are base64-encoded encryption keys in plain text format.If you select a password for your private key, its file will be encrypted withyour password. Be sure to remember this password or the key pair becomes useless.

The private.pem file looks something like this:

The public key, public.pem, file looks like:

Protecting Your Keys

Depending on the nature of the information you will protect, it’s important tokeep the private key backed up and secret. The public key can be distributedanywhere or embedded in your web application scripts, such as in your PHP,Ruby, or other scripts. Again, backup your keys!

Remember, if the key goes away the data encrypted to it is gone. Keeping aprinted copy of the key material in a sealed envelope in a bank safety depositbox is a good way to protect important keys against loss due to fire or harddrive failure.

Oh, and one last thing.

If you, dear reader, were planning any funny business with the private key that I have just published here. Know that they were made especially for this series of blog posts. I do not use them for anything else.

Totalnin