I am writing an application which has an authenticity mechanism, using HMAC-sha1, plus a CBC-blowfish pass over the data for good measure. This requires 2 keys and one ivec.

I have looked at Crypto++ but the documentation is very poor (for example the HMAC documentation). So I am going oldschool and use Openssl. Whats the best way to generate and load these keys using library functions and tools ? I don't require a secure-socket therefore a x.509 certificate probably does not make sense, unless, of-course, I am missing something.

So, do I need to write my own config file, or is there any infrastructure in openssl for this ? If so, could you direct me to some documentation or examples for this.