The Crypto Services collection provides interfaces for handling cryptographic keys, certificates and certificate applications.
The Crypto Services collection provides the following functionality:
Certificate and key management
Storage and retrieval of certificates
Construction and validation of certificate chains
Verification of trust of a certificate
Generation, import and export of RSA, DSA and DH key pairs
Listing of available keys
Private key operations
Certificates and key are stored in a number of stores. Device creators can deploy their own key and certificate stores or use the file-based implementation provided by the Symbian platform.
Encoding and decoding Public Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS) key pairs
The ASN-PKCS component of the Crypto Services collection provides functionality for encoding and decoding PKCS#8 key pairs (including the key pairs encrypted in the PKCS#5 format). For details, see ASN-PKCS Overview.
Validating certificates
To validate a certificate, an application must have at least one certificate which it trusts directly. This is called a root certificate. Different applications trust different certificates.
The Crypto Services collection enables validation of certificates on an application-by-application basis. For details, see Certificate Validation in PKIX.
See the following topics for details of the key uses of the Crypto Services collection: