Use ICSF to protect sensitive data stored on your system, sent between systems, or stored off your system on magnetic tape. To protect data, encipher it under a key. When you want to read the data, decipher it from ciphertext to plaintext form.

ICSF provides encipher and decipher callable services to perform these functions. If you use a key to encipher data, you must use the same key to decipher the data. To use clear keys directly, ICSF provides symmetric key decipher, symmetric key encipher, encode and decode callable services. These services encipher and decipher with clear keys. You can use clear keys indirectly by first using the clear key import callable service, and then using the encipher and decipher callable services.

This topic describes these services:

• Ciphertext Translate (CSNBCTT or CSNBCTT1 and CSNECTT or CSNECTT1)
• Decipher (CSNBDEC or CSNBDEC1 and CSNEDEC or CSNEDEC1)
• Decode (CSNBDCO and CSNEDCO)
• Encipher (CSNBENC or CSNBENC1 and CSNEENC or CSNEENC1)
• Encode (CSNBECO and CSNEECO)
• Symmetric Algorithm Decipher (CSNBSAD or CSNBSAD1 and CSNESAD or CSNESAD1)
• Symmetric Algorithm Encipher (CSNBSAE or CSNBSAE1 and CSNESAE or CSNESAE1)
• Symmetric Key Decipher (CSNBSYD or CSNBSYD1 and CSNESYD or CSNESYD1)
• Symmetric Key Encipher (CSNBSYE or CSNBSYE1 and CSNESYE or CSNESYE1)