The reason is that if I understand the logic of Base64, it's
that each character stores 6 bits. My private key .pem has 49
lines of 64 characters worth of Base64, though the sat line
isn't full. Anyway, this is data worth of over 18000 bits. The
RSA key is supposed to be 4096 bits, so this can't be correct.
What am I missing?
PEM is a X.509 certificate (whose structure is defined using
ASN.1), encoded using the ASN.1 DER (distinguished encoding
rules), then run through Base64 encoding and stuck between
plain-text anchor lines (BEGIN CERTIFICATE and END CERTIFICATE).