X.509 certificate w. secp256k1?

[Peter R]

Quick question that Google doesn't seem to know the answer to: do X.509 certificates (the kind used in the new bitcoin payment protocol) support signatures using bitcoin's secp256k1 elliptic curve?  It seems that RSA is the most commonly used.  

[12648430]

Yes, you can do it with openssl. Command line example:

Code:

openssl ecparam -out ec_key.pem -name secp256k1 -genkey
openssl req -new -key ec_key.pem -x509 -nodes -days 365 -out cert.pem

[Peter R]

Perfect.  Thanks for the information 12648430.

[Mike Hearn]

It should work but such a certificate would be very unusual.

[MiWCryptoCurrencyMA]

This is a fantastic idea. Thanks for the concept; I wrote this paper to discuss what you could do with this:
 https://github.com/MiWCryptoCurrency/UTXOC/blob/master/UTXOCv1.pdf?raw=true

The git repository also has scripts:
https://github.com/MiWCryptoCurrency/UTXOC/

 * eckey2coin.py (to easily generate the address + QR code, based on pycoin key utils (ku).
 * utxocsr.py (to generate a certificate signing request from a raw EC key; and embed the transaction hash in the x509v3 Subject Alternative Name.