User's Guide
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public_key
User's Guide
Version 0.19

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Chapters

- Introduction
  - Top of chapter
  - Purpose
  - Prerequisites
  - Performance tips
- Public key records
  - Top of chapter
  - RSA as defined by the PKCS-1 standard and RFC 3447.
  - DSA as defined by Digital Signature Standard (NIST FIPS PUB 186-2)
- Certificate records
  - Top of chapter
  - Common Data Types
  - PKIX Certificates
  - Standard certificate extensions
  - Private Internet Extensions
  - CRL and CRL Extensions Profile
- Getting Started
  - Top of chapter
  - General information
  - PEM files
  - RSA public key cryptography
  - Digital signatures
  - SSH files

# 1 Introduction

### 1.1 Purpose

public_key deals with public key related file formats, digital signatures and X-509 certificates. It is a library application that provides encode/decode, sign/verify, encrypt/decrypt and similar functionality, it does not read or write files it expects or returns file contents or partial file contents as binaries.

### 1.2 Prerequisites

It is assumed that the reader has a basic understanding of the concepts of using public keys and digital certificates.

### 1.3 Performance tips

The public_key decode and encode functions will try to use the NIFs which are in the ASN1 compilers runtime modules if they can be found. So for the best performance you want to have the ASN1 application in the path of your system.