PKCS 1

In cryptography, PKCS #1 is the first of a family of standards called Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS), published by RSA Laboratories. It provides the basic definitions of and recommendations for implementing the RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography. It defines the mathematical properties of public and private keys, primitive operations for encryption and signatures, secure cryptographic schemes, and related ASN.1 syntax representations.

The current version is 2.2 (2012-10-27). Compared to 2.1 (2002-06-14), which was republished as RFC 3447, version 2.2 updates the list of allowed hashing algorithms to align them with FIPS 180-4, therefore adding SHA-224, SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256.

Keys

The PKCS #1 standard defines the mathematical definitions and properties that RSA public and private keys must have. The traditional key pair is based on a modulus, , that is the product of two distinct large prime numbers, and , such that .

Starting with version 2.1, this definition was generalized to allow for multi-prime keys, where the number of distinct primes may be two or more. When dealing with multi-prime keys, the prime factors are all generally labeled as for some , such that:

PKCS

In cryptography, PKCS stands for "Public Key Cryptography Standards". These are a group of public-key cryptography standards devised and published by RSA Security Inc, starting in the early 1990s. The company published the standards to promote the use of the cryptography techniques to which they had patents, such as the RSA algorithm, the Schnorr signature algorithm and several others. Though not industry standards (because the company retained control over them), some of the standards in recent years have begun to move into the "standards-track" processes of relevant standards organizations such as the IETF and the PKIX working-group.

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PKCS 11

In cryptography, PKCS #11 is one of the Public-Key Cryptography Standards, and also refers to the programming interface to create and manipulate cryptographic tokens.

Detail

The PKCS #11 standard defines a platform-independent API to cryptographic tokens, such as hardware security modules (HSM) and smart cards, and names the API itself "Cryptoki" (from "cryptographic token interface" and pronounced as "crypto-key" - but "PKCS #11" is often used to refer to the API as well as the standard that defines it).

The API defines most commonly used cryptographic object types (RSA keys, X.509 Certificates, DES/Triple DES keys, etc.) and all the functions needed to use, create/generate, modify and delete those objects.

Usage

Most commercial certificate authority software uses PKCS #11 to access the CA signing key or to enroll user certificates. Cross-platform software that needs to use smart cards uses PKCS #11, such as Mozilla Firefox and OpenSSL (using an extension). It is also used to access smart cards and HSMs. Software written for Microsoft Windows may use the platform specific MS-CAPI API instead.

PKCS 8

In cryptography, PKCS #8 defines a standard syntax for storing private key information. PKCS #8 is one of the family of standards called Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS) published by RSA Laboratories.

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