Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

Context Management API

You use the credentials obtained with the credential management API functions to establish a secure connection between client and server. The secure connection runs in its security context, which is a set of data such as a session key, the type of connection, its duration, and so on. You have one context per connection, so it's the same for both client and server.

Before establishing the secure connection, the client should initialize and the server should accept the security context. Depending on the security package, this process might take more than one roundtrip of negotiations. Typically, the negotiation follows these steps:

• The client creates and initializes the security context of a connection.
• The client sends the ...