RSA Laboratories, in conjunction with developers of security systems from industry, educational establishments and governmental sectors, have developed specifications, the aim of which is to speed the development of encryption and decryption technology using public keys.
These specifications are known as the Public-Key Cryptography Standards, or PKCS for short. Sections of this set of PKCS standards have since become components of many formal and de-facto standards, for example, ANSI X9 documents, PKIX, S/MIME and SSL/TLS.
PKCS#11 is the Cryptographic Token Interface Standard. The CRYPT product is based on Version 2.20 of PKCS#11, for some SHA-2 related mechanisms version 2.40 of this standard should be consulted.
This de-facto standard specifies a program interface (API) to devices that save cryptographic information and carry out cryptographic functions. The short form for the Cryptographic Token Interface is Cryptoki.
The specification for the PKCS#11 standard can be found on the Internet under: