Site News  |   Monitor Keywords  |   Monitor Archive  |   Organizer  |   Account Info  |

Cryptographic web service

Cryptographic web service description/claims

This application claims the benefit of provisional patent application No. 60/885,458, filed Jan. 18, 2007, which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

This invention relates to cryptography and more particularly, to cryptographic web services in which cryptographic functions are provided remotely over a network.

Cryptographic services are used in a variety of contexts, including database management, electronic commerce, and communications. Typical cryptographic services include encryption and decryption.

In some situations, it may be desirable to deploy a cryptographic service remotely. Remotely implemented cryptographic services may be shared among multiple computer programs and users.

With conventional remote programming arrangements, custom software is written on both local and remote computers. The remote software in this type of situation is written to perform a particular set of operations for the local software and does not have a generalized application program interface (API) that would allow the remote software to be invoked by other local software. When there are numerous different local computing environments to support, it can be difficult or impossible to implement the required local software efficiently. For example, the local software may not compile properly on certain platforms. Operating system and programming language incompatibilities may also cause problems. Moreover, maintaining a system with appropriate software updates can be challenging when supporting multiple platforms. These issues can significantly limit the deployment potential for conventional cryptographic services.

It would therefore be desirable to be able to provide cryptographic services remotely.

In accordance with the present invention, a cryptographic web service is provided that may be remotely accessed over a communications network such as the internet.

A program running on program computing equipment may make a local cryptographic function call. The program provides parameters for the local function call, such as data that is to be operated on and a cryptographic key. The parameters are encoded by a simple object access protocol interface on the program computing equipment.

The simple object access protocol interface at the program computing equipment makes a remote cryptographic function call that corresponds to the locally-called function. In making the remote function call, the simple object access protocol interface at the program computing equipment sends the encoded parameters to a simple object access protocol interface at the cryptographic web service. The simple object access protocol interface at the cryptographic web service decodes the encoded parameters and calls the remote cryptographic function using a cryptographic engine at the cryptographic web service. The cryptographic engine may be used to implement cryptographic operations such as encryption, decryption, signature verification, etc.

The cryptographic web service may authenticate the program. If desired, authentication credentials for the program may be provided as part of the transport protocol that is used in communicating between the simple object access protocol interfaces at the program computing equipment and the cryptographic web service. Other types of authentication credentials (e.g., a loginID and password) may also be uploaded to the cryptographic web service. The uploaded credentials or a set of associated credentials may be used in requesting a cryptographic key from a key server. External authentication of the program's authentication credentials may be performed using an authentication server. Following authentication, results from running the remote cryptographic function can be transmitted from the simple object access protocol interface at the cryptographic web service to the simple object access protocol interface at the program computing equipment over the internet and can be received by the program.

Further features of the invention, its nature and various advantages will be more apparent from the accompanying drawings and the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.

FIG. 1 is a diagram of an illustrative system environment including a cryptographic web service that is used remotely by a computer program in accordance with the present invention.

FIG. 2 is a diagram showing illustrative code that may be included in a program when using a web cryptographic service in accordance with the present invention.

FIG. 3 is a diagram showing illustrative code in a web services description language (WSDL) file in accordance with the present invention.

FIG. 4 is a flow chart of illustrative operations involved in setting up a cryptographic web service in accordance with the present invention.

• Provisional Patent
• Utility Patent

• What Is a Patent?
• What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?
• What Is a Copyright?
• Patent Laws