Public Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS) are a group of
public-key cryptography
Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...
standards devised and published by
RSA Security LLC, starting in the early 1990s. The company published the standards to promote the use of the cryptography techniques for which they had
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
s, such as the
RSA algorithm
The RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) cryptosystem is a public-key cryptography, public-key cryptosystem, one of the oldest widely used for secure data transmission. The initialism "RSA" comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonar ...
, the
Schnorr signature algorithm and several others. Though not
industry standards (because the company retained control over them), some of the standards have begun to move into the "
standards track" processes of relevant
standards organization
A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpr ...
s in recent years, such as the
IETF
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...
and the
PKIX working group.
Key Updates (2023–2024):
* Integration of
PKCS #7 and
PKCS #12 into broader standards like S/MIME and TLS.
* Evolution of
PKCS #11 to support newer hardware and cloud services.
* Involvement of PKCS standards in post-quantum cryptography efforts, with NIST's ongoing standardization.
* Growing adoption of PKCS standards in the context of blockchain and digital assets.
See also
*
Cryptographic Message Syntax
References
;General
*
External links
About PKCS(appendix G from
RFC 3447)
OASIS PKCS 11 TC(technical committee home page)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pkcs
Cryptography standards
Public-key cryptography
Standards of the United States