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Bare Metal RSA

I love detail. As a child, I would spend a great detail of time taking the back of things, in order to understand how things actually work. So in Cybersecurity, I love probing around and investigating the core formats. In fact, I think it is one of the most important skills. So, I’ve been investigating the DER format for storing cryptography asset, including for storing keys and digital certificates. If you want to understand the DER format, please read this:

Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER) format

Now we generate an RSA key with:

openssl genrsa -out private.pem 1024

This produces a PEM file:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIICXQIBAAKBgQCjmcr22TtipralMR7+k8TWRzl8oFqY+lzdty1oFqsW/IX5QO/p
zyIzl1yJJcYPTNNWdnzIRFaGMToMrq4ykwBwypBZGhsknC/O+SgPWhHY8ZkFedhq
BbJSP1LEqHbaLWNcon+/8ZXm9wFfg0ko8DOiCyzQIWqFKViz5Y0Pm9VCMwIDAQAB
AoGAP9QD1NUiDzYd8ks83XQHitZU/mONlTuwuav64i5d5+Tz3DBSqfTvUhOOvc9n
+5YsqgImYvgOjeJs1H/eZMrnk3n2uz7tuqiGM13FgmEPtK5X7BMxZN5Lc19jUQ3p
vJwRx9VP62GRm0ZxO0NczApxQ1aJhc34Zxi7hMIKyOZuqIkCQQDYJvvNTzNoJpKH
O7Vbw5TD0TEv7LCpuHXWqzqqadMvoKy48qvDWjXJ/pWYRVSVmi5pfUOp6nEqtpWs…