How to make a password-protected private key via REST

Hi Wyko, I could be off-base, but I don't think you can create the key this way. I believe you need to create the key from command line, either locally on a box and upload it to BIG-IP, or create it on command line on BIG-IP itself. Once that step is done, then you can create the file reference to that key with the REST methods.

That said, I would not recommend using the /tm/sys/crypto/key method, as the /tm/sys/crypto methods have been deprecated for a while, but rather the /tm/sys/file/ssl-key method instead. When using the latter method, you'll want to define sourcePath attribute like "file:///var/config/rest/downloads/my.key" or whereever you uploaded/created the key. So the data that you would POST to /tm/sys/file/ssl-key would look something like (using the bigrest python iControl REST wrapper here):

from bigrest.bigip import BIGIP

b = BIGIP('mybigip.local', 'admin', 'admin', session_verify=False)

key_data = {'name': 'testkey.key',
            'keySize': 2048,
            'keyType': 'rsa-private',
            'passphrase': 'encrypted passphrase here',
            'securityType': 'password',
            'sourcePath': 'file:///var/config/rest/downloads/mytestkey.key'
            }
response = b.create('/mgmt/tm/sys/file/ssl-key', key_data)

 This assumes of course you've created the key and moved it or uploaded it to the BIG-IP /var/config/rest/downloads folder.