On 12/18/2014 4:41 AM, Salz, Rich wrote:
Are you trying to be proscriptive (say what people should use) or descriptive 
(document what is in use)?

Yes, PKCS8-based PRIVATE KEY is better.  But RSA PRIVATE KEY is in (wide) use 
and should be described.

I am trying to be proscriptively descriptive about what is in use and will lead to (continued) interoperability.

In the case of the * PRIVATE KEY labels, not a lot of crypto software supports it. The two biggest ones that I know of are OpenSSL and PolarSSL. (To my knowledge PolarSSL only supports "RSA PRIVATE KEY" and "EC PRIVATE KEY"--all others need to be in "PRIVATE KEY" PKCS #8 format.) These two OSS implementations may in fact "dominate" the market but only a certain market segment (namely web servers, and by extension, the web interfaces to web servers by web hosting companies). If you want to import a private key into Mac OS X, Mozilla NSS, Microsoft CryptoAPI, or the Java VM, you need to package it up (typically with a certificate) in a PKCS #12 file.

PKCS #1 is an IETF (adopted) standard but PKCS #1 doesn't prescribe the "RSA PRIVATE KEY" label; it only defines the ASN.1 (BER/DER) representation. And PKCS #1 is no more or less a standard than the other IETF documents for the other key types, like Diffie-Hellman, ECC, etc.

Anyway, the document was approved so it should be published with *minor* changes as an RFC soon. I am loathe to add new labels/formats; I am not convinced the threshold is met here.

Cheers,

Sean

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