strongswan_pki---gen - Man Page

This sub-command of pki(1) is used to generate a new RSA or ECDSA private key.

-h,  --help

Print usage information with a summary of the available options.

-v,  --debug level

Set debug level, default: 1.

-+,  --options file

Read command line options from file.

-t,  --type type

Type of key to generate. Either rsa, ecdsa, ed25519, ed448 or bliss, defaults to rsa.

-s,  --size bits

Key length in bits. Defaults to 2048 for rsa and 384 for ecdsa. For ecdsa only three values are currently supported: 256, 384 and 521.

-p,  --safe-primes

Generate RSA safe primes.

-f,  --outform encoding

Encoding of the generated private key. Either der (ASN.1 DER) or pem (Base64 PEM), defaults to der.

If the gmp plugin is used to generate RSA private keys the key material is read from /dev/random (via the random plugin). Therefore, the command may block if the system's entropy pool is empty. To avoid this, either use a hardware random number generator to feed /dev/random or use OpenSSL (via the openssl plugin or the command line) which is not as strict in regards to the quality of the key material (it reads from /dev/urandom if necessary). It is also possible to configure the devices used by the random plugin in strongswan.conf(5). Setting libstrongswan.plugins.random.random to /dev/urandom forces the plugin to treat bytes read from /dev/urandom as high grade random data, thus avoiding the blocking. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that the key material generated this way is of lower quality.

pki --gen --size 3072 > rsa_key.der

Generates a 3072-bit RSA private key.

pki --gen --type ecdsa --size 256 > ecdsa_key.der

Generates a 256-bit ECDSA private key.

pki(1)