How to determine the number of bits used when generating a CSR

Posted on March 7, 2011 Updated on March 8, 2011

I was looking for an answer to this question today and stumbled across a page on the MaximumASP site, which indicates that looking at the first few characters of the CSR will provide the answer.

I still want to do a bit of research to verify that what they have said is true, but it seems to be, based on my limited test. I generated CSRs for 512-, 1024-, 2048-, 4096-, 8192-, and 16384-bits* and examined the first few characters. My generated CSRs for 512- and 1024-bits matched the MaximumASP page. Here are my results.

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