CAPICOM is a discontinued ActiveX control created by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

to help expose a select set of Microsoft

Cryptographic Application Programming Interface The Microsoft Windows platform specific Cryptographic Application Programming Interface (also known variously as CryptoAPI, Microsoft Cryptography API, MS-CAPI or simply CAPI) is an application programming interface included with Microsoft Windows ...

(CryptoAPI) functions through Microsoft Component Object Model (COM). It was intended to enable every environment that supports ActiveX to use Microsoft Cryptographic technologies, including web pages that are opened with Microsoft

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

or any other web browser that supports ActiveX. CAPICOM can be used to digitally sign data, inspect, verify and display their digital signature or digital certificate, add or remove certificates to or from the certificate stores, and finally, to encrypt or decrypt data. CAPICOM Version 2.1.0.3, the latest and last version of CAPICOM, is officially supported on Windows Vista. However, Microsoft has announced that CAPICOM is discontinued and is no longer being developed. Microsoft suggests replacing CAPICOM with

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

's X509 Cryptographic Classes and a number of other alternatives. CAPICOM was not included in Windows 7. The linked Microsoft article goes into detail.

References

Cryptographic software Microsoft application programming interfaces Microsoft Windows security technology Discontinued Windows components {{Microsoft-stub