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 RFC 5958 and might obsolete RFC 5208 someday in the future.
PKCS #8 private keys are typically exchanged in the PEM base64-encoded format, for example:
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