How to save public key from a certificate in .pem format

Question

I am using the below openssl command for storing my public key into a .pem file.

openssl> x509 -in E:/mycert.pem -pubkey  -out E:/mypubkey.pem

But when i try to use this command, it is storing the whole certificate info in the mypubkey.pem file.

I have seen that i can save my public key using

openssl> x509 -pubkey -noout -in cert.pem > pubkey.pem

But it is throwing an error. I can't use ">" operator.

Answer 1

There are a couple ways to do this.

First, instead of going into openssl command prompt mode, just enter everything on one command line from the Windows prompt:

E:\> openssl x509 -pubkey -noout -in cert.pem  > pubkey.pem

If for some reason, you have to use the openssl command prompt, just enter everything up to the ">". Then OpenSSL will print out the public key info to the screen. You can then copy this and paste it into a file called pubkey.pem.

openssl> x509 -pubkey -noout -in cert.pem

Output will look something like this:

-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAryQICCl6NZ5gDKrnSztO
3Hy8PEUcuyvg/ikC+VcIo2SFFSf18a3IMYldIugqqqZCs4/4uVW3sbdLs/6PfgdX
7O9D22ZiFWHPYA2k2N744MNiCD1UE+tJyllUhSblK48bn+v1oZHCM0nYQ2NqUkvS
j+hwUU3RiWl7x3D2s9wSdNt7XUtW05a/FXehsPSiJfKvHJJnGOX0BgTvkLnkAOTd
OrUZ/wK69Dzu4IvrN4vs9Nes8vbwPa/ddZEzGR0cQMt0JBkhk9kU/qwqUseP1QRJ
5I1jR4g8aYPL/ke9K35PxZWuDp3U0UPAZ3PjFAh+5T+fc7gzCs9dPzSHloruU+gl
FQIDAQAB
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----

Answer 2

if it is a RSA key

openssl rsa  -pubout -in my_rsa_key.pem

if you need it in a format for openssh , please see Use RSA private key to generate public key?

Note that public key is generated from the private key and ssh uses the identity file (private key file) to generate and send public key to server and un-encrypt the encrypted token from the server via the private key in identity file.