RSA key pairs, SSH keys, and certificates all involve public/private key cryptography under the hood, which is probably why they get mentally filed together — but they exist to solve different problems, and mixing them up causes real confusion when setting up a new server or debugging a failed connection.
RSA keys: the general-purpose building block
An RSA key pair is the underlying cryptographic primitive — a public key anyone can use to encrypt something or verify a signature, and a private key that alone can decrypt it or sign something. An RSA Key Pair Generator is useful whenever you need this primitive directly, independent of any specific protocol built on top of it.
SSH keys: authentication for remote access
SSH keys are RSA (or increasingly Ed25519) keys used specifically to authenticate to a remote server without a password — your public key sits in the server's authorized_keys file, and your private key on your machine proves who you are. An SSH Key Pair Generator produces a pair in the exact format servers and Git hosting platforms expect.
Certificates: identity backed by a trusted third party
A certificate takes a public key and adds a signed statement, from a Certificate Authority, that says "this key really does belong to this domain." That's the extra layer HTTPS relies on. A Certificate Decoder lets you inspect an existing certificate's details — issuer, validity dates, subject — without needing OpenSSL installed.
CSRs: the request that becomes a certificate
Before a Certificate Authority issues a certificate, you generate a Certificate Signing Request containing your public key and identifying details, then send it to the CA. Getting the fields (common name, organization, SANs) wrong in a CSR Generator is a common reason certificate issuance gets delayed or rejected.
HMAC: verifying a message wasn't tampered with
Separate from all of the above, HMAC is about proving a message hasn't been altered and genuinely came from someone holding a shared secret — common in webhook verification and API request signing. An HMAC Generator is handy for testing that a webhook signature check on your own server is actually implemented correctly.
For hands-on experimentation with all of these concepts together, TeckForge's Encryption Playground lets you try different algorithms side by side — entirely client-side, so private keys and secrets you generate for testing never leave your browser.
