Why a RSA private key can be encrypted with a password?

Cause it’s more secure, if someone else steals the key he can’t know the key. If I’m a Certificate Authority it’s a good idea to have my private key encrypted.

I had a problem with matrixssl, because the code crashed when it reads my private key, I found it cause I was using an encrypted private key and the example code thar reads the certificate and private key doesn’t receive a password. When I debuged I found that my private key wasn’t in the expected ASN.1 format, so I thought it was a incomatibility version bettwen matrixssl 1.8.3 and openssl 0.9.8 because I found in their changes history some bug fixes on ASN.1 but it only was that I had to make my private key without the encryption or another solution is to change the example code and add the private key password as a parameter and send it to the matrixRsaReadPrivKey function.

If you don’t want to encrypt your private key you have to add the ‘-nodes’ parameter to the ‘openssl req ‘ command