Glossary

The following is a list of some common PKI and cryptography related acronyms:

Abbreviation	Description
ADSS	Advanced Digital Signature Services server (a server-side product from Ascertia for providing signature generation/verification, certificate validation and other trust services.
CA	Certificate Authority (logical entity responsible for issuing certificates and optionally also CRLs)
CAPI	Microsoft Crypto API
Cert	X.509 Digital Certificate
CRL	X.509 Certificate Revocation List
CMS	Cryptographic Message Syntax (a digital signature format)
DBMS	Database Management System
DNV	Det Norske Veritas (an Ascertia partner providing signature verification services using ADSS server)
DSA	Digital Signature Algorithm
DSS	Digital Signature Service (a web services standard from the OASIS organisation)
HSM	Hardware/Host Security Module
HTTP	Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
HTTP/S	HTTP over TLS connection
JDBC	Java Database Connectivity
IETF	Internet Engineering Task Force
LDAP	Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
LDAP/S	LDAP over a TLS connection
Log4j	A robust logging API from Apache
LTANS	Long-Term Archive and Notary Service
PKCS	Public Key Cryptographic Standards
PKI	Public Key Infrastructure
RSA	Rivest, Shamir, Adleman (public key algorithm)
OCSP	Online Certificate Status Protocol (an IETF protocol for verifying the revocation status of a digital certificate)
SCVP	Server-based Certificate Validation Protocol
SHA	Secure Hash Algorithm (there are various algorithms in this family, e.g. SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512 etc)
S/MIME	Secure MIME (standard for signing emails)
TA	Trust Authority (general term for an authority trusted for some e-service(s), e.g. for issuing certificates, CRLs, OCSP responses and/or time stamps)
TLS	Transport Layer Security
TSA	Time Stamp Authority (authority responsible for issuing timestamp tokens to prove that a document/data existed at a particular time)
TSP	Time Stamp Protocol (the protocol for communicating with a TSA)
VA	Validation Authority (logical entity responsible for validating certificates or verifying full digital signatures)
XKMS	XML Key Management Specifications
XML DigSig	XML Digital Signature standard