[openssl-dev] OpenSSL and certain PEM formats

[Salz, Rich]

> > I am putting the finishing touches on an Internet-Draft for textual
> > encodings of security structures
> > <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-josefsson-pkix-textual-09>, which
> > OpenSSL refers to as the "PEM format".

Cool.  You know why it's called PEM format, right?  (RFC 1115 et al)

> > #define PEM_STRING_X509_PAIR    "CERTIFICATE PAIR"
> >   (note, this is supposed to encapsulate a CertificatePair structure
> > from X.509)

This is not used anywhere in openssl.  I just removed it and did a build :)  The fact that the fields are named forward and backward, makes me think it was intended for SSL/TLS use.  But as I said it's not used and I'll remove it soon.

> > #define PEM_STRING_SSL_SESSION    "SSL SESSION PARAMETERS"

As Kurt said, this is for internal use only, no guarantee it works across any two revisions.

> > #define PEM_STRING_PARAMETERS    "PARAMETERS"
> >   (note, this label does not have any algorithms in it, so I presume
> > it refers to some kind of generic parameter structure)

It's used to encode arbitrary parameters for ENGINE, which is OpenSSL's crypto-hardware abstraction.