Question

Would it be possible to embed the private and public key for a simple server application into it through the C/C++ APIs? Preferably without hacking the entire OpenSSL library first.

And by embed I mean by passing either something like a string or a char* to the API instead of reading directly from a file.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the d2i_X509() function to directly convert a DER-encoded certificate from an unsigned char * buffer into an X509 object:

const unsigned char cert_DER[] = /* ... */;

const unsigned char *p = cert_DER;
X509 *cert_X509 = d2i_X509(NULL, &p, sizeof cert_DER);

There are similar d2i_*() functions for other OpenSSL objects, like keys – eg. d2i_RSAPrivateKey().