/etc/publickey
is the public key database used for secure
RPC (Remote Procedure Calls).
Each entry in
the database consists of a network user
name (which may either refer to
a user or a hostname), followed by the user's
public key (in hex
notation), a colon, and then the user's
secret key encrypted with
its login password (also in hex notation).
This file is altered either by the user through the
chkey(1)
command or by the system administrator through the
newkey(8)
command.
The file
/etc/publickey
should only contain data on the
NIS
master machine, where it
is converted into the
NIS
database
publickey.byname.
