Certificate Handling

Werner Koch wk@gnupg.org
Fri, 7 Jul 2000 18:47:52 +0200


Hello,

On Fri, 7 Jul 2000, Tarun Upadhyay wrote:


> a) What kind of coding for certificates should be supported. I plan to
> support PEM immediately. Is DER also essential?
> b) How should a private key protected? How should its access authenticated
> without prompting for a password?
Please have a look at OpenSSL and see how they do it. For server applications it does not make much sense to store the secret key encrypted unless you want to have an operator to enter that passpharse on every startup. The best solution would be a hardware token, used to store and process the secret key. I am currently looking at such things. Werner -- Werner Koch OpenPGP key 621CC013 OpenIT GmbH tel +49 211 239577-0 Birkenstr. 12 email wk@OpenIT.de D-40233 Duesseldorf http://www.OpenIT.de