CK_DEFINE_FUNCTION(CK_RV, C_GetOperationState)(
CK_SESSION_HANDLE hSession,
CK_BYTE_PTR pOperationState,
CK_ULONG_PTR pulOperationStateLen
);
C_GetOperationState obtains a copy of the cryptographic operations state of a session, encoded as a string of bytes. hSession is the session’s handle; pOperationState points to the location that receives the state; pulOperationStateLen points to the location that receives the length in bytes of the state.
Although the saved state output by C_GetOperationState is not really produced by a “cryptographic mechanism”, C_GetOperationState nonetheless uses the convention described in Section on producing output.
Precisely what the “cryptographic operations state” this function saves is varies from token to token; however, this state is what is provided as input to C_SetOperationState to restore the cryptographic activities of a session.
Consider a session which is performing a message digest operation using SHA-1 (i.e., the session is using the CKM_SHA_1 mechanism). Suppose that the message digest operation was initialized properly, and that precisely 80 bytes of data have been supplied so far as input to SHA-1. The application now wants to “save the state” of this digest operation, so that it can continue it later. In this particular case, since SHA-1 processes 512 bits (64 bytes) of input at a time, the cryptographic operations state of the session most likely consists of three distinct parts: the state of SHA-1’s 160-bit internal chaining variable; the 16 bytes of unprocessed input data; and some administrative data indicating that this saved state comes from a session which was performing SHA-1 hashing. Taken together, these three pieces of information suffice to continue the current hashing operation at a later time.
Consider next a session which is performing an encryption operation with DES (a block cipher with a block size of 64 bits) in CBC (cipher-block chaining) mode (i.e., the session is using the CKM_DES_CBC mechanism). Suppose that precisely 22 bytes of data (in addition to an IV for the CBC mode) have been supplied so far as input to DES, which means that the first two 8-byte blocks of ciphertext have already been produced and output. In this case, the cryptographic operations state of the session most likely consists of three or four distinct parts: the second 8-byte block of ciphertext (this will be used for cipher-block chaining to produce the next block of ciphertext); the 6 bytes of data still awaiting encryption; some administrative data indicating that this saved state comes from a session which was performing DES encryption in CBC mode; and possibly the DES key being used for encryption (see C_SetOperationState for more information on whether or not the key is present in the saved state).
If a session is performing two cryptographic operations simultaneously (see Section ), then the cryptographic operations state of the session will contain all the necessary information to restore both operations.
An attempt to save the cryptographic operations state of a session which does not currently have some active saveable cryptographic operation(s) (encryption, decryption, digesting, signing without message recovery, verification without message recovery, or some legal combination of two of these) should fail with the error CKR_OPERATION_NOT_INITIALIZED.
An attempt to save the cryptographic operations state of a session which is performing an appropriate cryptographic operation (or two), but which cannot be satisfied for any of various reasons (certain necessary state information and/or key information can’t leave the token, for example) should fail with the error CKR_STATE_UNSAVEABLE.
Return values: CKR_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL, CKR_CRYPTOKI_NOT_INITIALIZED, CKR_DEVICE_ERROR, CKR_DEVICE_MEMORY, CKR_DEVICE_REMOVED, CKR_FUNCTION_FAILED, CKR_GENERAL_ERROR, CKR_HOST_MEMORY, CKR_OK, CKR_OPERATION_NOT_INITIALIZED, CKR_SESSION_CLOSED, CKR_SESSION_HANDLE_INVALID, CKR_STATE_UNSAVEABLE.
Example: see C_SetOperationState.