Crypto Services Overview

The Crypto Services collection provides interfaces for handling cryptographic keys, certificates and certificate applications.

Description

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.

Components

The Crypto Services collection comprises the following components:

Using Crypto Services

See the following topics for details of the key uses of the Crypto Services collection: