What is a .KEY file?
The .key extension is used by both Apple Keynote presentations and PEM cryptographic keys.
Apple Keynote presentation
- What it is
- An Apple Keynote presentation (iWork). Analyser shows the QuickLook preview Apple embeds - rendered page by page - and reads the document type and iWork version.
- How to tell it apart
- A Keynote file is a ZIP package (starts with the bytes PK).
- Did you know
- Keynote began as private software built for Steve Jobs's own stage presentations before Apple released it to the public in 2003.
- Keynote 1.0 launched on 7 January 2003 as a standalone app costing 99 US dollars, and only became free with new Apple devices from 2013.
- Inside the ZIP package, a modern Keynote stores its data as IWA files encoded with Google's Protocol Buffers rather than plain XML.
PEM cryptographic key
- What it is
- A PEM-encoded cryptographic key (OpenSSL, OpenSSH) - an RSA, EC or Ed25519 private or public key. Analyser reads the key type and PKCS encoding and warns that a private key is secret.
- How to tell it apart
- A PEM key is text beginning with -----BEGIN.
- Did you know
- PEM stands for Privacy-Enhanced Mail, a 1990s email scheme that flopped - but its Base64 -----BEGIN----- wrapper became the universal way to store keys and certificates.
- PEM comes from a set of 1993 IETF standards (RFC 1421 onwards) that were largely abandoned in favour of PGP and S/MIME, leaving only the text wrapper behind.
- The Base64 between the BEGIN and END lines is just DER-encoded ASN.1 binary re-wrapped as ASCII so it survives being pasted into email or a config file.
- Depth of analysis
- .KEY is an identification-grade format: Analyser recognises it from its bytes and decodes the header metadata it carries, rather than opening it in a full viewer. Formats that do get a full viewer are marked "Full" on the formats page.
- Open a .KEY file
- Drag a .KEY file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It is identified entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.