What encoding does [BouncyCastle] PKCS10CertificationRequest.getEncoded() return?

Question

Does it return DER encoded data, or some other format?

The Javadoc I've been able to find leaves something to be desired details-wise...

Answer 1

At least for v1.52, org.bouncycastle.pkcs.PKCS10CertificationRequest#getEncoded() is implemented as:

public byte[] More ...getEncoded()
    throws IOException
{
    return certificationRequest.getEncoded();
}

This calls org.bouncycastle.asn1.pkcs.CertificationRequest#getEncoded(), which results in the inherited method org.bouncycastle.asn1.ASN1Object#getEncoded(). This method actually has some Javadoc, and it states "Return the default BER or DER encoding for this object".

I wasn't completely sure whether this guarantees DER encoding, so I did the following:

private byte[] makeDEREncodedRequest(final PKCS10CertificationRequest request) {
    try {
        return request.toASN1Structure().getEncoded(ASN1Encoding.DER);
    } catch (IOException e) {
        // ... <Exception handling code> ...
    }
}