Cryptographic Service Providers (CSPs)

As mentioned above, CSPs are independent modules that perform the real cryptographic work. Ideally, they are written to be completely independent of any particular application, so that any given application will run with a variety of CSPs. In reality however, some applications may have very specific requirements that require a custom CSP.

The physical manifestation of a CSP consists of, at a minimum, a dynamic-link library (DLL) and a signature file. The signature file is necessary to ensure that the operating system recognizes the CSP. The operating system validates this signature periodically to ensure that the CSP has not been tampered with.

Some CSPs may implement a fraction of their functionality either in an address separated service called through local RPC, or in hardware called through a system device driver. Isolating global key state and central cryptographic operations in hardware or in a service keeps keys and operations safe from tampering within the application data space.

Applications should not take advantage of attributes particular to a specific CSP. For example, the Microsoft RSA Base Provider currently uses 40-bit session keys and 512-bit public keys. When applications manipulate these, they should be careful not to make assumptions about the amount of memory needed to store them. Otherwise, the application is likely to fail when the user loads a different CSP onto the system. You should take care to write applications that are as well-behaved and flexible as possible.

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