Certificate store functions provide for certificate storage, retrieval, and manipulation. A user site may, over a period of time, collect many, many certificates. Typically, the site will have a few certificates describing the user of the site, and then many certificates describing entities with which the user wishes to communicate. Usually, for each entity there is more than one certificate—there is a complete chain of certificates that provides a verification trail back to the root CA.
The certificate store functions provide a way to store, retrieve, enumerate, verify, and use the information stored in the certificates.