The Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI) provides a common interface between transport-level applications, such as Microsoft RPC or a file system redirector, and security providers, such as Windows NT Distributed Security. SSPI provides a mechanism by which a transport application can call in to one of several security providers, and obtain an authenticated connection without knowledge of the details of the security protocol.
The functions defined fall into the following major categories:
Several of the functions in this API return time stamps to represent the life span of various objects. All of these time stamps should be in local time. The provider is, of course, free to maintain time in any fashion, but the times provided at this API boundary should always be in local time to simplify the work of applications that make use of these functions.