How to generate a public and private key pair in ECDSA

At Fabank, we use ECDSA with the secp256k1 curve to create and validate digital signatures, the same curve used by Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.

Therefore, we recommend one of the following 3 ways to create a pair of public and private keys in ECDSA.

Remember: your private key should never be shared with anyone, not even us!

Solution using OpenSSL

On Mac (OSX) and most Linux distributions, OpenSSL is already installed on the machine. Windows users need to install OpenSSL to use this solution. We recommend the version that comes with the Git for Windows.

To create your key pair, open the terminal (Git Bash on Windows) and enter the commands below

openssl ecparam -name secp256k1 -genkey -out privateKey.pem
openssl ec -in privateKey.pem -pubout -out publicKey.pem