Subject: subjectPublicKeyInfo

From: Michele Boivin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2000 14:01:43 +0100

Dear Sirs,

in section 7.3 of the "Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure
Certificate and CRL Profile" you state that the subjectPublicKey is 
1. a BitString with value: DER encoded RSA public key,
2. a BitString with value: ASN1 encoded Diffie HEllman public key
3. a BitString with value: ASN1 DER encoded DSA Public Key, where DSA
public key is encoded as an INTEGER.

In the ansi x.9.62 standard the subjectPublicKey for ECDSA is said to be
the ASN1 encoded ECDSA public key, where ECDSA public key is an octet
string. 
My question is, do all public keys need to be DER encoded and is the
value of the BIT STRING always the DER encoded public key?

With best regards,

Michele Boivin
PhD Program 
"Enabling Technologies for Electronic Commerce"