Q: What is the aspd process?

Today on my Mac running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Little Snitch intercepted a connection request from the apsd process, so I went to Google to find out what "apsd" is, and I found this thread. I have been using this Mac (and Little Snitch) for six months and I don't recall seeing a connection request from the apsd process before. In my case, what is new is that I recently set up an iCloud account on my Mac, including an iCloud e-mail account in Mail.app. In the six prior months, I had been using my Mac without iCloud. As you probably know, iCloud e-mail accounts use push notifications. As noted above, "apsd" stands for Apple Push Notification Service daemon. Since I never saw a connection request from the apsd process until I set up an iCloud account on my Mac, I suspect the apsd traffic is exclusively iCloud-related in my case.