-help

Print out a usage message.

-out

Output the key to the specified file. If this argument is not specified then standard output is used.

-passout

the output file password source. For more information about the format of arg see the PASS PHRASE ARGUMENTS section inopenssl(1).

-F4|-3

the public exponent to use, either 65537 or 3. The default is 65537.

-rand

a file or files containing random data used to seed the random number generator, or an EGD socket (see RAND_egd(3)). Multiplefiles can be specified separated by an OS-dependent character. The separator is ; for MS-Windows, , for OpenVMS, and : for allothers.

-engine

specifying an engine (by its unique id string) will cause genrsa to attempt to obtain a functional reference to the specifiedengine, thus initialising it if needed. The engine will then be set as the default for all available algorithms.numbitsthe size of the private key to generate in bits. This must be the last option specified. The default is 2048.NOTESRSA private key generation essentially involves the generation of two prime numbers. When generating a private key various symbolswill be output to indicate the progress of the generation. A . represents each number which has passed an initial sieve test, + meansa number has passed a single round of the Miller-Rabin primality test. A newline means that the number has passed all the prime tests(the actual number depends on the key size).Because key generation is a random process the time taken to generate a key may vary somewhat.BUGSA quirk of the prime generation algorithm is that it cannot generate small primes. Therefore the number of bits should not be lessthat 64. For typical private keys this will not matter because for security reasons they will be much larger (typically 1024 bits).