2015-01-13

I was reading up a little on openvpn and pki infra and am confused by some of the questions posed by my colleague. :)
This answer did help me understand more: http://security.stackexchange.com/a/12369/66224

But I am still stuck with some questions. Searching hasn't helped much.

1.1. In the openvpn with pki process, we create the ca first, which gives us the ca.crt and ca.key; more importantly, we get a dh2048.pem and a crl.pem.

1.2. Then we go about creating files (.keys and .crts) for the entities (here, entity means openvpn client or server; basically, a 'client' for the ca)

PKI uses RSA which is as follows (copied from:http://docs-legacy.fortinet.com/fweb/admin_hlp/5-0-0/index.html#page/FortiWeb_Help/how_to_apply_PKI_client_auth.html)

2.1 n = pq; p,q = big primes

2.2 phi = (p-1)(q-1)

2.3 e < n, such that gcd(e,d) = 1

2.4 d = e^(-1) mod phi

2.5 (n,d) is the private key

2.6 (n,e) is the public key

I see that the ca.crt is a key, dh2048.pem is a key, client.crt is a text and client.key is again a key.
How do these map to the algorithm variables above?
Thanks.

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