It can be used by cryptographic schemes and protocols to digitally sign, digest, authenticate or encrypt any form of digital data.
The architecture of CMS is built around certificate-based key management, such as the profile defined by the PKIX working group.
CMS is used as the key cryptographic component of many other cryptographic standards, such as S/MIME, PKCS #12 and the RFC 3161 digital timestamping protocol.
OpenSSL is open source software that can encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify, compress and uncompress CMS documents, using the openssl-cms command.
Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) is regularly updated to address evolving security needs and emerging cryptographic algorithms.