Resolving "No DEK-Info Header in Block" Error for Encrypted PKCS8 Private Key

When attempting to decode an encrypted PKCS8 private key using Go, you may encounter the error "no DEK-Info header in block." This indicates that the key decoding function is not able to process encrypted PKCS8 private keys.

The generation of the key using the provided OpenSSL commands appears to be correct. However, Go's standard library does not natively support decrypting encrypted PKCS8 private keys.

Solution:

To resolve this issue, you can utilize an external library specifically designed for handling PKCS8 key decryption. An example of such a library is the "pkcs8" library, available on GitHub.

Suppose you have the following code for decrypting the PKCS8 key using the "pkcs8" library:

import "github.com/youmark/pkcs8"

func DecryptPKCS8(key []byte, password string) (*pkcs8.PrivateKey, error) {
    block, _ := pem.Decode(key)
    return pkcs8.Decrypt(block.Bytes, []byte(password))
}

This function takes the encrypted PKCS8 key in the form of a byte slice and the decryption password as arguments. It then attempts to decode the PEM block, which contains the encrypted key data.

If the decoding is successful, the function calls the Decrypt function from the "pkcs8" library to perform the actual decryption. The decrypted key is then returned as a *pkcs8.PrivateKey struct.

By incorporating this library and using the DecryptPKCS8 function to process encrypted PKCS8 keys, you can resolve the "no DEK-Info header in block" error.