2 ms·
Really?! I read 8032 because people told me I should and all the strings in there are bit or octet strings, anyone looking for textual serialization is going to
by timbray 5y ago
Really?! I read 8032 because people told me I should and all the strings in there are bit or octet strings, anyone looking for textual serialization is going to come up empty. Also 8032 is way too heavyweight for mere mortals. Also bear in mind that lots of languages aren't as transparent as Go and their devs, given something purporting to be a public key, aren't going to look inside, they're just going to ask "where's the API to serialize/deserialize this so I can post it on the Web?" So yeah, I agree it would be a short RFC, but once it existed, people would arrange for those APIs to exist.
- FiloSottile 5y agoI think we might have different ideas of the purpose of RFCs, but I don't expect end users to read them. What I'm saying is that RFC 8032 already defines a binary encoding for Ed25519 keys (the octet strings you've found). How to encode a binary string in text is IMHO orthogonal, and has nothing to do with Ed25519. Similarly, PKIX definex binary DER encodings, and PEM defines how to encode DER as text. DER : PEM = Ed25519 binary encoding : Base64