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Neat 📸

"What a private key actually is These are elliptic-curve keys on the P-384 curve. The private key is just a number, d. The public key, the thing that goes in the certificate for the world to see, is d × G, where G is a fixed point on the curve that everyone uses and "×" means adding G to itself d times using the curve's special arithmetic. Going forwards is easy, but going backwards, from the public key to d, is considered to be impractical. That's the entire security model, and it only holds if d is enormous. A P-384 private key should be a random 384-bit number, which gives you 2³⁸⁴ possibilities (or roughly 10¹¹⁵), so nobody is ever going to search that." pvt key = 4 View quoted note →