How to Create a Public/Private Key Pair for an Application

Objective

Creating a public/private key pair for a new or existing Application.

Applies To

• Application
• Security
• Authentication

Procedure

Public-key or asymmetric cryptography is a system where a cryptographic public key is paired with a private key. Data encrypted with one key can only be decrypted by the other key. However, you cannot compute one key using the other. To authenticate your application, you use asymmetric keys to sign a JSON Web Token (JWT).

You can generate a key pair in your browser via the Dashboard when creating or managing an application or locally using the Application API or Vonage CLI.

When generating the key pair for your application in Dashboard, the public key field is automatically populated with the public key, and the private key is downloaded as a file (“private.key”) to your device.

To generate a private/public key pair for a new application using Dashboard:

• Go to create an application.
• Click Generate key pair.
• Save application

To generate a private/public key pair for an existing application using Dashboard:

• Go to your applications.
• Click Generate key pair.
• Save application

Note that when generating a key pair using the Generate key pair link in order to protect your security Vonage does not have access to the private key, and the key pair is generated locally in your browser.