Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the "simplified" functions available in the Crypto API. You saw how you can use these functions to, in a single function call, perform what would have taken a significant amount of code given what you knew a few chapters ago. This functionality is all keyed on using certificates as a means to exchange public keys and is thus dependent on the information you learned in the previous few chapters, which dealt with how to get, manage, and validate certificates.

Now you know how, after you have your certificates and the key exchange certificates of the people you want to send messages to, you can send and receive messages in a secure manner. You also can verify that the message came from the other person and hasn't been modified in transit. These functions provide you with the key pieces of functionality to be able to build secure messaging applications.

In the next chapter, you'll look at how you can build an application that can communicate through the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). You'll learn how this protocol works and how you can build applications that use it to communicate.