[ Thanks to Frank for
this link. ]
“Cryptography is rapidly becoming a critical part of
our daily lives. However, the application of cryptographic
technology adds a heavy computational burden to today’s server
platforms. More systems are beginning to use specialized hardware
to offload the computations, as well as to help ensure the security
of secret key material. This article will discuss openCryptoki, an
API that is rapidly becoming the de facto, non-Windows-platform
industry standard for interfacing between cryptographic hardware
and user space applications. In particular, this article will
introduce the specifics of the PKCS #11 implementation to IBM
cryptographic hardware (openCryptoki) that is available in open
source form here on developerWorks.”