Applications
What this screen is for
An application is the business system on whose behalf cryptographic work is done: a payments service, card issuance, a reporting pipeline. It records who owns that system and how sensitive it is, and it contains the cryptographic actors that authenticate and call the platform. The application itself never authenticates and holds no credential.
One business system can be registered as several applications to separate concerns, for example a producer that only encrypts and a consumer that only decrypts.
What must exist first
- A tenant you administer. Both SIMPLE and STANDARD tenants use this screen.
- The permission to list or read applications, which is what shows this screen. Creating an application, deleting one, and reading deleted applications are further permissions, each held separately.
Decisions you make here
Reading the counts above the list
Three tiles above the list count your tenant's applications, all of them and not only the page shown: Total Applications, every application that has not been deleted; Active, those whose status is active; and With Credentials, those with at least one credential usable now — not deleted, not revoked and inside its validity window — held by an actor that has not been deleted. A suspended application or actor still counts there; status is what Active counts.
An actor that authenticates only through a federated identity bound to a trusted issuer holds no credential, so an application whose actors all do so counts as without credentials. The tiles are read again after you create or delete an application. When the counts cannot be read, the tiles say whether you lack the permission or the read failed; on an older platform server each tile reads not provided by this server. The list below is shown either way.
Creating an application
With the permission to create applications, Create Application opens a wizard that asks for:
- Identity: the Application Name, required and unique among your tenant's applications that have not been deleted (a difference only in the case of the letters A to Z does not make two names different; some letters outside A to Z, such as ß, may still count as different), which is the application's technical name; an optional Display Name shown in lists; and a Description.
- Business Info: the environment, business unit, cost center, owner and technical contact — who answers for the application and where its usage is charged.
- Risk & Compliance: the data classification, risk level and regulatory scope — what the application handles and which regulations it falls under.
Both of those steps record labels. They are shown on the application, beside its exchanges and in reports, and every one of them can be edited later; none of them changes what the application is allowed to do, and no operation is refused because of them. - Review & Create, where you confirm everything before the application is created.
Creating an application also creates its Default Cryptographic Actor. That actor has no credential yet, so nothing can authenticate as it until a credential is issued for it.
On a STANDARD tenant, that actor still needs two things before anything can use it: a credential to authenticate with, and a decision about which operation it may perform on which key. The Cryptographic Exchange wizard does both in one pass — it issues the Default Actor's first credential and shows the secret there, and the capability you choose when you activate the exchange is what the actor may do.
Issuing the credential first from the actor's own Credentials tab is still available and ends in the same place. On a SIMPLE tenant, provision an internal use case for the application instead: the use case composes the actor, credential and grants itself.
Opening an application
Selecting an application opens its detail in a panel beside the list, with three tabs:
- Info: the application's record, read each time you open it — its identifier, technical and display names, description, status, environment, business unit, cost center, owner and Owner email, technical contact and Technical contact email, data classification, risk level, regulatory scope, Tags, External references, and when it was created and last updated.
- Actors: the cryptographic actors the application holds, with the Default Actor marked. Each one opens its own detail on the actors screen. An application with no actor says so, and a list that cannot be read says whether it was refused or failed rather than showing no actors. On a SIMPLE tenant the tab points to Internal Use Cases, which compose the actors and their credentials.
- Activity: the application's history, described below.
Add Actor and Delete Application sit at the foot of the panel when you hold the corresponding permission; Add Actor is not offered on a SIMPLE tenant.
On Info, a value that was never entered reads "—". A row that reads not provided by this server means the platform server is older than this console and does not send that information; it says nothing about the application. When the record cannot be read, Info says so, or says the application was not found in this tenant, and shows no values in its place.
Adding an actor to an application
On a STANDARD tenant, with the permission to create actors, opening an application offers Add Actor. It creates an additional cryptographic actor under that application, for example one actor for each external processor. SIMPLE tenants do not get this control.
Deleting an application
With the permission to delete applications, Delete Application in the application's detail is terminal and cannot be undone. You confirm it by typing the application's name. Nothing the application contains blocks the deletion, so review what it holds before you confirm. The deletion reaches all of it:
- Its internal use cases and capability grants are revoked, its exchange contexts are closed, and its cryptographic exchanges are revoked.
- Every one of its cryptographic actors is disabled, including the Default Actor, so nothing can authenticate as them any more.
- Keys used only through this application's actors are archived, with their material retained and never destroyed. An active or expired key is revoked for an administrative cause and then archived; a suspended key is revoked for a security compromise when that is why it was suspended, so it stays sealed, and for an administrative cause otherwise; a revoked key is archived keeping its cause; and a key already archived or pending destruction is left as it is. A key still used by an actor outside this application keeps its current state, and so does a key reached only through an internal use case.
With the permission to read deleted applications, a Retired tab lists the deleted applications and what each one contained, read-only. There is no restore.
A deleted application does not keep its name. You can create a new application with the same name; it is a different application with its own identifier and nothing from the deleted one: no actors, credentials or grants. On an environment created before this rule, a deleted application's name stays reserved until the environment is recreated.
Reviewing activity
The Activity tab shows the cryptographic operations run by every actor the application holds, and the changes made to the application itself. All, Administration and Usage choose between both, the changes only, and the operations only. Each operation names the actor that ran it.
Each kind states how many of its entries are loaded out of how many it holds, for example Usage: 50 of 132 loaded. Load more reads the next entries, and once every entry is loaded the view says that kind's history is complete. On All, the two kinds are merged newest first only as far back as both are loaded: the view states the date the list is complete back to, and Load more extends the kind that stops there.
A next page that fails is stated with Retry and keeps what is already loaded, and a refused one says so; neither claims the history is complete.
Reading operations and reading changes are separate audit permissions: when one is refused or fails, the view says which and still shows the other, never an empty history in its place.
View in Audit Log opens the Audit Log narrowed to this application over the last 365 days, where the same operations and changes can be searched, filtered and exported.
How it relates to other screens
The actors an application contains, their credentials and their roles are managed on the actors screen, which each row of the Actors tab opens:
The application an exchange context belongs to, named on that context's Info tab, opens its detail here; a link that names no valid application, or one that cannot be read, says the application could not be opened:
The application's full audit trail, filtered by View in Audit Log:
An internal use case is always provisioned for an existing application:
On a STANDARD tenant, the wizard that takes an application's actor all the way to a system that can call the platform is: