I’ve been experimenting with ways to interact with cryptographic certificate formats within TouchDesigner, more from a curiosity and workflow experimentation angle than for any security-critical reason. Lately, something caught my attention: the relationship between PEM files and generating CSRs (Certificate Signing Requests). While these two are typically handled in external systems or command-line tools like OpenSSL, I got inspired by this concept and began wondering whether this model — of deriving structured requests from encoded keys — could have a conceptual or functional reflection inside TouchDesigner.
To clarify for context: the “PEM to CSR” process refers to taking a PEM-formatted private key (which is a base64-encoded file commonly used in cryptographic systems) and using it to create a CSR — a certificate signing request — which contains identifying information and the public key. This CSR is what gets sent to a Certificate Authority to obtain a signed certificate. The inverse idea, sometimes described in terms like “CSR to PEM,” isn’t literally about converting backwards but rather about the logical relationship between a private key and the structure it helps generate. I found this tool on ( Convert PEM To CSR Online for Free ). I was positively inspired by this transformation concept — where one structured input creates a meaningful, verifiable output — and it made me think about similar structuring inside TouchDesigner’s node workflows.
So here’s where I’m hitting a wall: when I want to simulate this kind of data evolution (like PEM to CSR), how do I keep things clean, trackable, and interpretable within the tool? I’ve been trying to come up with a system where I have a set of inputs (could be user choices, live sensor values, or generative randomness) and I want to have a middle layer that forms a kind of “request” or structured output which can then be passed along or validated by another part of the system. I initially leaned toward using Table DATs or even replicator setups, but it gets very cluttered when I need it to feel like a standardized “data request” template each time.
I’m also unsure what the best operator combo would be if I’m aiming for that serialized and self-contained intermediate structure — for example, if I wanted to encapsulate a snapshot of my user logic into something like a digital “request package.” Should I lean more toward JSON DAT encoding approaches and pass that along via WebSocket or TCP/IP operators? Or is there a way to simulate a CSR-like structure internally with Python in a Script DAT that builds and routes this “request” based on dynamic network states?
The other challenge I find myself facing is validating that output in real time. Unlike with PEM and CSR, where the structure has a strict schema and gets verified by external authorities, in TouchDesigner I don’t really know how best to validate the format or completeness of my structured data packages — beyond just manually viewing or logging it. Is there any common practice or clever system where others here validate complex internal state bundles before acting on them?
I’d be really interested to hear if anyone has built something that feels like a “request-response” architecture entirely within TouchDesigner — not through external APIs, but something that flows through the nodes themselves. Like a module emits a structured request and another module accepts and responds based on that. Do you guys tend to simulate this using DAT workflows, CHOP scripting, or something more visual and custom?
Really just trying to stretch how I think about modular communication inside the tool, and hoping some of you have had similar thoughts or inspirations. Would appreciate hearing what approaches or tricks others use when trying to formalize parts of their network into reusable, verifiable packages — especially ones that evolve from an initial set of raw data like how a PEM becomes a CSR.