RSA and hex string conversion

[Zuxy Meng]

Hello,

I'm writing a protocol plugin for pidgin that deals with the following 
tasks:

During account login, the server would return an RSA pubkey as its modulus 
and exponent expressed in hex string like

"ccba8a2950e74226...."

And the client needs to encrypt with this key the SHA-1 hash of a string 
that contains account name, password and random salt, and return the 
encrypted message to the server.

With OpenSSL these tasks can be easily accomplished with functions like 
BN_hex2bn(), RSA_public_encrypt(), SHA1_Update() etc., however, I don't want 
to introduce a new dependency to my plugin and hope to use functions in 
libpurple itself.

The SHA-1 hash can be beautifully accomplished with 
purple_cipher_context_digest_to_str(), but libpurple doesn't support RSA 
natively, so I have to turn to the NSS library that is shipped with 
libpurple. Sadly the NSS interface to RSA encryption looks so tedious to me, 
as I have to convert the hex string to DER format first and call lots of 
supporting routines before the actual encryption.

Here I have two questions:

1. Is there any existing code in one of purple plugins that use NSS to do 
RSA encryption?

2. Are there any existing functions in glib, gtk, purple or some other 
library that purple depends on that can do a hex string -> byte array 
conversion? I.e. convert the string "ccba8a29..." to { 0xcc, 0xba, 0x8a, 
0x29, ... }
--
Zuxy