Cryptographic Application Programming Interface
Overview
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
included with Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s that provides services to enable developers to secure Windows-based applications using cryptography
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
. It is a set of dynamically-linked libraries
Dynamic-link library
Dynamic-link library , or DLL, is Microsoft's implementation of the shared library concept in the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems...
that provides an abstraction layer
Abstraction layer
An abstraction layer is a way of hiding the implementation details of a particular set of functionality...
which isolates programmers from the code used to encrypt the data.
