[openssl-users] genpkey usage for openssl-1.0.1k on openSUSE-13.2

[Earl Killian]

On 2015/2/19 00:22, Dave Thompson wrote:
> genpkey has a standard idea, across all algorithms that have parameters
> (which RSA does not), to generate parameters and key(s) as separate
> steps with a file in between. For DSA and DH this is good; you may want
> to generate your own params, or you may want to use existing ones
> (in an existing file) e.g. Oakley or SSH-non-GEX. For EC it makes less
> sense,
> as generating your own curve is complicated (OpenSSL certainly doesn't do
> it)
> and in practice everyone* uses the named curves. Nonetheless you still do:
>
> openssl genpkey -genparam -algorithm EC -pkeyopt ec_paramgen_curve:x >pfile
> openssl genpkey -paramfile pfile >keyfile
Thank you, this is clear now. It might be worth adding an example to the 
man page to prevent others from being similarly confused.