Previous Topic: How the MDU Decrypts a B2B Tape

Next Topic: Shared Key Rings

Key Rings

A key ring is a collection of digital certificates. On a mainframe system, key rings belong to specific users. The certificates on one user's key ring are not accessible to any other user. By allowing the CA Tape Encryption started task to access key rings, the program can refer to them when needed.

CA Tape Encryption uses a hierarchy of section names in parmlib to specify key rings and to manage their attributes. Key rings may be defined as either “shared” or “user” key rings.