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Privacy-Enhanced Mail
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<p>Privacy-Enhanced Mail (PEM) is a <a href="/facts/De_facto/3Du6WQKh">de facto</a> file format for storing and sending cryptographic <a href="/facts/Key_(cryptography)/5W5PAmT4">keys</a>, <a href="/facts/Public_key_certificate/J7aYI4Bx">certificates</a>, and other data, based on a set of 1993 <a href="/facts/Internet_Engineering_Task_Force/tIcCsFhX">IETF</a> standards defining "privacy-enhanced mail." While the original standards were never broadly adopted and were supplanted by <a href="/facts/Pretty_Good_Privacy/4BELG9BW">PGP</a> and <a href="/facts/S%2fMIME/YufdsBt3">S/MIME</a>, the textual encoding they defined became very popular. The PEM format was eventually formalized by the IETF in RFC 7468. </p>