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The Solaris Cryptographic Framework

Paul Sangster, Valerie Bubb, Kais Belgaied; March 2005

The Solaris Cryptographic Framework provides cryptographic services to users and applications through commands, a user-level programming interface, a kernel programming interface, and user-level and kernel-level frameworks. The Solaris Cryptographic Framework provides these cryptographic services to applications and kernel modules in a manner seamless to the end user, and brings direct cryptographic services, like encryption and decryption for files, to the end user.

The user-level framework is responsible for providing cryptographic services to consumer applications and the end-user commands. The kernel-level framework provides cryptographic services to kernel modules and device drivers. Both frameworks give developers and users access to software-optimized cryptographic algorithms.

The programming interfaces are front-ends to each of the frameworks. A library or a kernel module that provides cryptographic services can be plugged into one of the frameworks by the system administrator, making the plug-in's cryptographic services available to applications or kernel modules. This flexibility allows the system administrator to plug in different cryptographic algorithm implementations or hardware accelerated cryptographic providers.

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Table of Contents:

• 1.0 Overview
• 2.0 Framework Architecture
• 2.1 Cryptographic Applications
• 2.2 Cryptographic Security Services
• 2.3 Framework
• 2.4 Cryptography Providers
• 3.0 Component Details
• 3.1 Applications
• 3.1.2 Included End-User Commands
• 3.2 Framework
• 3.2.1 User-Level Cryptographic Framework (uCF)
• 3.2.1.1 Convenience Functions
• 3.2.2 Kernel-Level Cryptographic Framework (kCF)
• 3.3 Module Verification Daemon
• 3.3.1 Signing Providers
• 3.4 Cryptography Providers
• 3.4.1 Sun Software Crypto
• 3.4.2 Sun Kernel Crypto Plug-In
• 3.5 Administration
• 3.6 Consumers
• 4.0 Distribution
• 5.0 References
• Appendix A: User-Level Programming Example

Unless otherwise licensed, code in all technical manuals herein (including articles, FAQs, samples) is provided under this License.