This article gives an overview of Nexus Personal Desktop Client.

Nexus Personal Desktop allows you to use smart card and soft tokens for authentication/signing from standard applications like browsers, email clients and winlogon but also from third party applications using standardized APIs such as Microsoft Cryptographic Application Programming Interface (CAPI) on Windows and PKCS#11 on all different platforms. Also included is a minidriver module that implements a Microsoft smart card minidriver. 

Key features

• Windows logon
• Email encryption
• Browser TLS client certificate authentication
• Browser signing and authentication using Personal Desktop plugout technology
• Third party applications using Microsoft CryptoAPI and PKCS#11 interface
  • Read more here: Cryptographic functions in Personal Desktop Client
• Minidriver module
  • Read more here: Minidriver component

Plugout browser integration

Personal Desktop enables signing/authentication in web browsers without plugins using the plugout technology where Personal Desktop is triggered from the browser page. Hermod is the server API used to trigger the web browser signing and the server API is identical whether you will sign/authenticate using Personal Desktop or authenticate out-of-band using a mobile device.

See Plugout web browser integration for more detailed descriptions.