The OCSF framework is responsible for maintaining data that may be required to perform cryptographic and security operations. The internal context structure maintains information pertaining to the parameters of the cryptographic operation, such as the type of algorithm to be performed, and maintains a list of attributes to customize the information stored in the context. These attributes can be of different types, including keys, dates, and raw data buffers. When the application creates a context, it supplies a set of parameters based on what type of context it is, and the framework returns a handle to that context. The application can then use that handle to add additional attributes to the framework, and update the contents of the existing attributes. The context handle is passed to the functions that perform the actual cryptographic operations. The data and attributes are retrieved from the context management system for use by the addin performing the operations. When the application is done with a context, it should pass the handle to the CSSM_DeleteContext function in order to free up the memory used by that context.