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Is it something specific, with a definite structure, or just an arbitrary data file with some form of encryption to hold keys, and potentially other secret information? Can someone please explain the term or point me to a link.
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Windows has a cryptographic key store, and it is simply located in a folder on your hard drive. On my Windows 10 machine, this path is C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto and inside that folder, there are various other folders for each key type. In this example, we will be looking at the RSA\MachineKeys subfolders.
The RSA key container is nothing but a container for storing your Private key, public key pair. When you create a key container . Net actually creates a random Public Key for encrypting the data and a private key for decryption the data and is stored in the container.
To create a machine-level RSA key container Create a new, machine-level RSA key container by running aspnet_regiis.exe with the following options: The -pc option followed by the name of the RSA key container, to create the RSA key pair. The -exp option, to make sure that the key is exportable.
Machine-level RSA key containers are available to all users that can log in to a computer, by default, and are the most useful as you can use them to encrypt or decrypt protected configuration sections while logged in with an administrator account.
By a large margin, the primary context in which I've encountered the term "key container" is as part of Microsoft's CryptoAPI. In this context, the short answer is that a key container is a logical structure that contains a set of key pairs according to its implementation.
Essentially, a key container is an abstract construct that's implemented by any of a number of cryptographic service providers (CSP), such as the Microsoft Base Cryptographic Provider. Key containers are stored, encrypted, in the system registry, and their data format is implementation-dependent. However, you can see an example of what a key container looks like by using the ASP.NET tool aspnet_regiis. (There may be equivalent tools to do this without having to install IIS, but I'm not aware of them.)
A few relevant references:
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