In cryptography, PKCS #8 is a standard syntax for storing private key information. PKCS #8 is one of the family of standards called Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS) created by RSA Laboratories. The latest version, 1.2, is available as RFC 5208.
The PKCS #8 private key may be encrypted with a passphrase using one of the PKCS #5 standards defined in RFC 2898, which supports multiple encryption schemes.
A new version 2 was proposed by S. Turner in 2010 as <nowiki>RFC 5958</nowiki> and might obsolete <nowiki>RFC 5208</nowiki> someday in the future.
PKCS #8 private keys are typically exchanged in the PEM base64-encoded format, for example: