Hi, looking at a post by Sisyphus on comp.lang.perl. misc, it seems that you CAN use the numeric keys, like you tried in your original post. He showed a neat trick ( which I will have to explore further) where he reblessed the key data, and it works.

This brings up alot more possiblities where you might be able to remove the priv_key , and write it in PEM, so as to distribute the key?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Crypt::DSA;

my $dsa = Crypt::DSA->new;

# my $key = $dsa->keygen(Size => 512, Verbosity => 1);  
# print ref $key; foreach my $k (keys %{$key}) {  
# print $k . "=" . $key->$k . " ";  
# } 

my %key;

# Note: keys shortened for display
$key{"priv_key"} = ........86791024560681741810216";
 $key{"p"} =  .........7985558533404147484885008958544
 $key{"g"} = ........1562731546589267205891649491991
 $key{"q"} = .......97436093010198645746872403487";
# $key{"pub_key"} = ......5081267508071818636049670044
# don't need pub_key for signing

my $sig_msg = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\n" x 40;

my $k = \%key;
bless($k, "Crypt::DSA::Key");

$sig = $dsa->sign(Message=>$sig_msg, Key => $k);
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