These are some notes about the p11-kit persistence format

The format is designed to be somewhat human readable and debuggable, and a bit
transparent but it is also not encouraged to read/write this format from other
applications or tools without first discussing this at the the mailing list:

p11-glue@lists.freedesktop.org

The format of the file reflects the PKCS#11 attributes exposed by p11-kit. The
attributes have a one to one mapping with PKCS#11 attributes of similar names.
No assumptions should be made that an attribute does what you think it does
from the label.

Each object in the file starts with the header '[p11-kit-object-v1]'. After that
point there are names and valeus separated by colons. Whitespace surrounding
the names and values is ignored.

Boolean values are 'true' and 'false'. Unsigned long attributes are plain
numbers. String/binary attributes are surrounded with quotes and percent
encoded. Object id attributes are in their dotted form. Various PKCS#11
constants are available.

PEM blocks can be present within an object, and these contribute certain
PKCS#11 attributes to the object. The attributes that come from PEM blocks
never override those explicitly specified. A 'CERTIFICATE' type PEM block
contributes the 'value', 'class', 'certificate-type', 'subject', 'issuer'
'start-date', 'end-date', 'id', 'certificate-category', 'check-value',
'serial-number' attributes with appropriate values.

Comments starting with a '#' and blank lines are ignored.

Only rudimentary checks are done to make sure that the resulting attributes
make sense. This may change in the future, and invalid files will be
unceremoniously rejected. So again use the mailing list if there's a need
to be writing these files at this point:

p11-glue@lists.freedesktop.org

Example file:

[p11-kit-object-v1]
class = certificate
modifiable = true
java-midp-security-domain = 0
label = "My special label"
id = "%01%02%03go"

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIEXDCCA0SgAwIBAgIEOGO5ZjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADCBtDEUMBIGA1UEChML
................................................................
B/L/CNDi3tm/Kq+4h4YhPATKt5Rof8886ZjXOP/swNlQ8C5LWK5Gb9Auw2DaclVy
vUxFnmG6v4SBkgPR0ml8xQ==
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
x-distrusted = true