IBM has created the IBM Common Cryptographic Architecture (CCA) as the basis for a consistent cryptographic product family. Implementations
of this architecture were first released in 1989, and it has been extended throughout the years.
The IBM 4758 and its CCA support program feature is a recent CCA product offering that today implements a portion of those functions available with older products as well as many new
services such as the support of the SET protocol.
Application programs and utility programs (requestors) obtain services from the security product, such as the IBM 4758, by issuing service
requests (verb calls) to the runtime subsystem of software and hardware.
The way in which application programs and utilities are linked to the API services depends on the computing environment. However, when using Java programming language and the IBM Common
Java Interface to CCA, the code is almost portable between the different environments.
IBM currently has products which support the CCA architechture available on the following operating systems:
Windows NT/2000/XP (xSeries)
AIX (pSeries)
OS/400 (iSeries)
z/OS (zSeries)
The IBM Common Java Interface to CCA (or CCA in Java) provides wrapper classes for using the CCA API from Java. Besides the Java classes, the CCA in Java package also
includes code to handle the native side of CCA. For instance, when using this package under Windows a DLL is included in the package and loaded transparently.
Prerequisite to using this package is familiarity with the contents of the IBM 4758 PCI Cryptographic Coprocessor General Information Manual
that discusses topics important to the understanding of the information presented in this manual:
