Use certificate storages

Certificate storages are used to store, manage and validate certificates, to build certificate chains, and also to access the certificates, stored on hardware devices.

Each of the uses is described in more details in corresponding how-to article.

SecureBlackbox includes several certificate storage classes. They are TElMemoryCertStorage, TElWinCertStorage and TElPKCS11CertStorage. All those classes are desendants of the abstract TElCustomCertStorage class, which provides common access, export/import, lookup functionality.

TElMemoryCertStorage is a class for storing and managing certificates in memory. The contents of TElMemoryCertStorage can be saved to the data stream (file, BLOB stream etc) and loaded from the stream in various formats.

TElWinCertStorage provides read-write access to the certificates, contained in Windows certificate storage, Windows registry, LDAP storages, or other storage types, accessible via CryptoAPI interface. This includes access to hardware certificate storages (smartcards, USB tokens).

TElPKCS11CertStorage provides read-write access to hardware certificate storages (smartcards, USB tokens) via so-called PKCS#11 drivers (special DLLs, provided by hardware vendors).