Raw Private Keys and the meaning of "Extractable"

I have personally never seen a system where "extractable" means that a remote
server may read local private keys.  Extractable in my book means that the user
may through an OS/Browser-defined mechanism export such keys in for example
PEM or PKCS #12 format.

If private keys are to be exchanged between a user-agent and service, the current
practice is to encrypt them.  This makes the representation of their raw format
essentially a no-issue, or to be more correct, it is delegated to the wrapping layer.

Anders

Received on Thursday, 16 August 2012 04:49:20 UTC