Nelson B. Bolyard wrote:

> Robert Relyea wrote:
> 
>>Steven T. Hatton wrote:
>>
>>
>>>There seems to be a descrepency between the versions of certutil in the
>>>meaning of the -k option of -R.  The documentation indicates that switch
>>>preceeds the key "short name".  OTOH the -H option on the certutil from
>>>the NSS 3.3.1 indicates the -k distinguishes between rsa and dsa key
>>>types.  Does this mean I can no longer specify the key to use when
>>>generating a request?
>>>
>>Yes. Short-name was an unsupportable hack we removed before we even open
>>sourced NSS. Certutil now used the module that all the rest of our apps
>>use: generate the key when you make the request.
>>
> 
> One of the requests commonly expressed by users in this newsgroup is the
> ability to import key pairs into NSS and then generate a cert request 
> using the existing key pairs.  The old "short name" scheme may indeed have
> been an "unsupportable hack", but there needs to be some way to do it.


There's not problem referencing a private key programmatically if you 
have the public key. If the problem is to import the keypairs then 
generate a cert request, that feature can be added to certutil.

The difficulty is generating a key from the command line, then later 
trying to reference that key before a cert for that key is installed. 
One possibility is to include a public key file which you can reference 
later, and maybe a command to generate these files all the orphanned keys.

The short name scheme would not have solve this problem BTW because 
there is currently no command line way import a keypair into NSS.

bob


> 
> --
> Nelson Bolyard
> 


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