Cryptographic Service Provider Last modified: Friday, November 04, 2005
Short for Cryptographic Service Provider it provides software or hardware-based encryption and decryption services.  It contains implementations of cryptographic standards and algorithms. At a minimum, a CSP consists of a dynamic-link library (DLL) that implements the functions in CryptoSPI (a system program interface). Most CSPs contain the implementation of all of their own functions. See also cryptography.
Apple Cryptographic Service Provider (PDF) This document describes, at a very high level, the capabilities of the Apple CSP for Mac OS X. These capabilities are described in terms of key types and formats and supported algorithms. Architecture of a Cryptographic Service Provider This section describes the internal structure of a typical cryptographic service provider (CSP) and explains some of the assumptions implicit in the CryptoAPI/CryptoSPI design. Although each CSP is structured differently, the material in this section is general and applies to all cryptographic service providers. Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) The Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) extends the JCA API to include APIs for encryption, key exchange, and Message Authentication Code (MAC). Together, the JCE and the cryptography aspects of the SDK provide a complete, platform-independent cryptography API. Learn About Windows Cryptography AspEncrypt is built around the Microsoft Cryptographic Application Programming Interface (CryptoAPI) which is part of the Win32 API. It is therefore important to know the basics of the Microsoft implementation of cryptography in order to understand how AspEncrypt works.

Related Terms

cryptanalysis cryptography encryption encryption algorithm key escrow public-key encryption security steganography symmetric encryption symmetric-key cryptography