Re: posting to public-webcrypto, and a user report

I've seen the same behavior. My understanding of this is that the API
effectively says that public keys should only be used for encryption and
signature verification, and private keys should only be used for decryption
and signing. Of course, with RSA, either of the two keys could be used
mathematically for any operation, but the API is operating at a more
abstract level.
…

i could almost understand this if the API enforced public key import and
> export via certificates, but i don't see any cert support at all! :-S
>

You can build that on top of the API. There are some third-party libraries
that can help with the BER encoding/decoding. I wrote a detailed example of
importing a public key from a certificate without using any other libraries
at http://blog.engelke.com/2014/10/21/web-crypto-and-x-509-certificates/ .
There's also an example of verifying the CA signature on the certificate
there.

I found it difficult to understand the API and apply it to my use cases,
but it gets clearer the more I use it. I've found all crypto APIs to be
tricky to use, anyway. This is no exception.

Charlie