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   Description
   Applicability
   Ease of Use
   Availability
   Standards
   References

Overview
ISC CDKs make standards-based cryptographic building blocks available to developers and integrators. Use them to construct secure corporate applications for internal use or OEM products for resale.

Description
ISC CDKs are flexible, cost effective libraries of linkable cryptographic modules that allow you to add encryption, digital signatures, and message authentication to any application. They reduce the cost of developing secure applications by applying readily available, commercially supported, conventional and public key technology.

Purchase a complete toolkit or have us customize one that targets your specific application. ISC can provide implementations of the following federal and industry standards:

• NIST Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
• NIST Data Encryption Standard (DES), triple DES (TDES), and DESX
• NIST Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and Elliptic Curve DSA (ECDSA)
• Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) public key technology
• NIST Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1, SHA-224/256/384/512)
• MD2/MD5 hash algorithms
• Diffie-Hellman (DH) and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) Key Agreement
• ElGamal, and elliptic curve ElGamal, public key cryptosystems
• AT&T proprietary exportable DES replacement (EA2)

(A more complete list of the available cryptographic algorithms, protocols, and schemes appears in the table below.)

Wide Ranging Applicability
ISC CDKs can be used to add encryption and authentication to a wide variety of applications:

• security-enhanced device drivers (such as a encrypting file system filter)
• e-mail applications
• electronic funds transfer and EDI
• document transmission, and
• messaging and VoIP products

The latest version even provides support for building simple SSL/TLS clients (with one- or two-sided authentication).

Ease of Use
The ISC CDKs provide C/C++ APIs that allow your programmers to rapidly link them into existing code or into new applications under development. (CDK 7.0 C++ documentation is available on-line.) Testimonial from a satisfied customer:

I'm very pleased to say that we could integrate your library into our existing system without any problem in development environment. How do I describe it was so easy?

Each kit includes a test file with commented sample source code illustrating the use of each function. This test program also can be compiled to verify the proper operation of the cryptographic engines on your operating system. Virtually unlimited key sizes can be supported for the public key algorithms.

Commercial Availability
ISC CDKs are available for the following platforms:

• Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP, PocketPC/ARM (including kernel mode)
• Solaris 2.x,7,8,9/SPARC, Solaris 8/x86, SunOS 4.1.3/SPARC
• HP-UX 10.x/11.x/11.i
• IBM AIX (32- and 64-bit versions)
• Linux i86
• Mac OS X
• SGI IRIX 6.x
• Compaq Tru64 and OpenVMS/AXP
• Cray UNICOS

These libraries can be used in your internal corporation applications or in applications developed for resale; they can even be used to build a security-enhanced device driver that operates in Windows kernel mode. An initial CDK license includes two developer seats; additional developer seats may be purchased as needed. Per copy licensing fees are required for redistribution of the CDK with applications that employ its cryptographic code.

Contact us via e-mail for fee schedules, header files, and sample code, or for further information on custom libraries.

Standards Compliance

CDK 7.0 meets NIST FIPS 140-2 and DoD NSTISSP #11 acquisition requirements, and has been approved by NSA for classified use. It was awarded NIST FIPS 140-1 Level 1 Certificate No. 347. Certification was performed by a NIST-accredited laboratory that did source code level validation of all supported FIPS approved algorithms and security interfaces. Review and oversight was provided jointly by NIST and CSE.

At the time of validation, there were no formal NIST test suites for certain FIPS approved algorithms. In these cases we ran standard industry tests, provided letters of assurance to NIST, and the NIST-accredited CMT lab checked the source code and test results. These algorithms are marked VA (for "Vendor Affirmed") in the NIST certificate column of the table below.

Only products containing FIPS 140-validated security modules may be purchased and used for the processing of sensitive data by agencies of the U.S. Federal Government. Such products are also recommended by the Government of Canada.

NIST NOTE: FIPS 140-2 is now in effect. However, Agencies may continue to purchase, retain and use FIPS 140-1 validated modules.

The cryptographic primitives that can be included in a custom CDK for your company's use comply with the following Federal and industry standards:

In addition to the algorithms listed in the first part of the above table, CDK 7.0 includes:

• X.509v3 certificate and CRL handling (RFC2459, RFC3279, RFC3280, NIST SP 800-15)
• PKCS#7/#8/#10/#12 PDU creation and parsing
• basic S/MIME v3 CMS functions for PDU creation and parsing (RFC3370. RFC3851, RFC3852)
• key derivation functions for PKCS#5 PBE and various ANSI and PKCS#1/#3/#5/#8 (RFC2313-2315) padding, encoding, and decoding functions
• RFC3394 key wrapping and unwrapping
• pseudo-random number generation, primality testing, and routines for low-level modular exponentiation and other high-precision arithmetic operations (in rings of integers, finite fields, and elliptic curves)
• simple SSL/TLS client support

CDK 7.0 is the cryptographic engine used in all builds of SecretAgent 5.7 and above, SpyProof! 1.x, SecretAgent Mobile, SecretAgent 5.6 for PocketPC/ARM, and SpyProof! 1.x.

References

    ANSI/ABA Security Standards for Financial Services
    The IEEE 1363 website

Addressing a Popular FIPS 140-2 vs. FIPS 140-1 Misconception
Even though 140-2 is the current standard, products validated under 140-1 have not been deprecated. According to NIST, U.S. Government "agencies may continue to purchase, retain and use FIPS 140-1 validated modules after May 25, 2002. Modules validated as conforming to FIPS 140-1 and FIPS 140-2 are accepted by the Federal Agencies of both [the U.S. and Canada] for the protection of sensitive information." Furthermore, "Cryptographic modules that have been approved for classified use may be used in lieu of modules that have been validated against this standard [FIPS 140-2]." (Quoted text taken from NIST website on 3/26/07.)