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As such, RSA Security, and its research division, RSA Labs, were interested in promoting and facilitating the use of public key techniques. To that end, they developed the PKCS standards. They retained control over them, announcing that they would make changes/improvements as they deemed necessary, and so the PKCS standards were not, in a significant sense, actual industry standards despite the name. Some, but not all, have in recent years begun to move into 'standards track' processes with one or more of the standards organizations.
| PKCS Standards Summary | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Version | Name | Comments | |
| PKCS#1 | 2.1 | RSA Cryptography Standard | See RFC 3447. Defines the format of RSA encryption. |
| PKCS#2 | - | Withdrawn | No longer active. Covered RSA encryption of message digests, but was merged into PKCS#1. |
| PKCS#3 | 1.4 | Diffie-Hellman Key Agreement Standard | |
| PKCS#4 | - | Withdrawn | No longer active. Covered RSA key syntax, but was merged into PKCS#1. |
| PKCS#5 | 2.0 | Password-based Encryption Standard | See RFC 2898. |
| PKCS#6 | 1.5 | Extended-Certificate Syntax Standard | Defines extensions to the old v1 X.509 certificate specification. Obsoleted by v3 of the same. |
| PKCS#7 | 1.5 | Cryptographic Message Syntax Standard | See RFC 2315. Forms the basis for S/MIME; used to sign and/or encrypt messages under a PKI. Used also for certificate dissemination (for instance as a response to a PKCS#10 message). |
| PKCS#8 | 1.2 | Private-Key Information Syntax Standard | |
| PKCS#9 | 2.0 | Selected Attribute Types | |
| PKCS#10 | 1.7 | Certification Request Standard | See RFC 2986. Format of messages sent to a Certification Authority to request certification of a key pair. See certificate signing request. |
| PKCS#11 | 2.20 | Cryptographic Token Interface (cryptoki) | An API defining a generic interface to cryptographic tokens (see also Hardware Security Module ). |
| PKCS#12 | 1.0 | Personal Information Exchange Syntax Standard | Defines a file format commonly used to store private keys with accompanying Public key certificateAs used in cryptography and computer security, a public key certificate (also called identity certificate is a block of bits containing, in a specified format, the public half of an asymmetric key algorithm key pair (the "public key"), together with idents protected with a password-based symmetric key. |
| PKCS#13 | – | Elliptic Curve CryptographyElliptic curve cryptography (ECC is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the mathematics of elliptic curves. Proponents claim that ECC can be faster and use smaller keys than older methods — such as RSA — while providing an equivalent level of Standard | (Under development) |
| PKCS#14 | – | Pseudo-random Number GenerationA pseudorandom number generator PRNG is an algorithm which generates a sequence of numbers, the elements of which are approximately independent of each other. The outputs of pseudorandom number generators are not truly random—they only approximate some of | (Under development) |
| PKCS#15 | – | Cryptographic Token Information Format Standard | (Retired) |