Symbian
Symbian OS Library

SYMBIAN OS V9.3

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Crypto Overview

The Crypto component (crypto.dll) is provided for general use in certificate management: any certificate specification will use some or all of its functionality.

Elements of a certificate which are common across different certificate formats are implemented in this DLL as a set of abstract base classes. Thus DLLs implementing a particular certificate specification such as X.509 or WTLS (i.e. X509.dll, WTLSCert.dll) are expected to link to this DLL and derive its own specific classes from these, as well as adding any classes which only exist in that specification (X.509 extensions for example).

Classes defined here are agnostic about the particular encoding scheme used for objects so do not include any constructors for initialisation from binary data. So derived classes for a given specification will add constructors to initialise the objects from encoded binary data.

This DLL also helps localise the interface between certificate management and the cryptographic algorithms supporting it. It is called crypto.dll rather than cert.dll because its role expands beyond certificates.

Public classes are defined in the header file signed.h. Of the classes defined there, the following are intended for direct use by client code: