The Plasma applications are the agents tasked with accepting transferred data from the proxy on the client side and from CGI programs on the server side. It passes these data on to Plasma and returns the output to the proxy or to the CGI programs for secure transfer across the public network. The Plasma application gets passed only such data packets which actually have to be modified cryptographically by Plasma in either the ``to'' or ``from'' direction.
It is the responsibility of the Plasma application to analyze received data packets and to pass these Plasma tokens on to the security platform using the correct interface functions of the application independent interface [8].
Since Plasma is required to operate permanently as a background process, socket connections between the proxy and the Plasma application on the client side as well as between the CGI programs and the Plasma server application are necessary.