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Certificate, Key, and Trust Services Concepts

Certificate, Key, and Trust Services is a collection of functions and data structures used to authenticate and authorize users and processes using keys and certificates. Because in Mac OS X, certificates and keys are stored on a keychain, many of the functions in this API must be used in conjunction with functions in the Keychain Services API.

This chapter discusses some of the concepts you need to understand in order to use the Certificate, Key, and Trust Services API. In addition, keys and certificates are defined and discussed in Security Overview.

Contents:

Certificates, Keys, and Identities
Certificate, Key, and Trust Services and CDSA
Policies and Trust

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