A Cryptography API: Next Generation Key Storage Provider for Cryptography in the Cloud

With the development of cloud computing in the latter years, many services have been migrated from the local servers to the cloud, the main motivation being a cut in the overall administration costs. The same thing is about to happen with digital certificates and digital signatures, as ETSI is currently working on standards for architectures and protocols for signature creation services. But from the moment these standards will be available and the moment in which all the popular signing applications will implement them, a gap will exists. This article presents a way of addressing this time gap: the implementation of a Key Storage Provider as an intermediate layer between the cryptographic API currently used by Microsoft Windows applications, and the signing services available in the cloud, thus allowing the current signing applications to use these cloud services in a transparent way.