Quite some time has passed since I bothered you with my last post 🙂 A lot has happened since, I have been making steady process in both smack-openpgp, as well as pgpainless.

One big step that I took was to get rid of smack-openpgp-bouncycastle, which now has been merged into smack-openpgp. Having modular code may be worthwhile, however it poses some big challenges. The biggest problem with having smack-openpgp not depend on smack-openpgp-bouncycastle was, that I could not use classes that represent encryption keys directly in smack-openpgp. Instead I had to create interfaces that encapsule functionality and call those in order to get stuff done from inside smack-openpgp. Last week me and flow decided that it would make my job a lot easier if we just got rid of smack-openpgp-bouncycastle by merging the two modules. In case there will be another implementation at some point, the code would still be modular enough to allow extension by overriding classes and methods.

Now smack-openpgp depends on pgpainless directly, which means that I don’t have to create duplicate code to get bundled information from pgpainless to smack-openpgp for instance. This change gave me a huge performance boost in the development process, as it makes the next steps much more clear for me due to less abstraction.

I rewrote the whole storage backend of smack-openpgp, keeping everything as modular as possible. Now there are 3 different store types. One store is responsible for keys, another one for metadata and a third one for trust decisions. For all of those I created a file-based implementation which just writes information to files. An implementor can for example chose to write information to a database instead. For all those store classes I wrote a parametrized junit test, meaning new implementations can easily be tested by simply inserting an instance of the new store into an array.

Unfortunately I stumbled across yet another bug in bouncycastle, which makes it necessary to implement a workaround in my project until a patched version of bouncycastle is released.
The issue was, that a key ring which consists of a master key and some subkeys was not exported correctly. The subkeys would be exported as normal keys, which caused the constructor of the key ring to skip those, as it expected sub keys, not normal keys. That lead to the subkeys getting lost, which caused smack-openpgp to be unable to encrypt messages for contacts which use a master key and subkeys for OpenPGP.

This bug has been fixed pretty fast by the bouncycastle team and the minimal test I created to illustrate my problem has been incorporated into bouncycastle. Thank you 🙂

Currently I’m working on a workaround for the bug in smack-openpgp, but that work is already working. Next I will polish up my test client and do some more field testing to iron out all the edge cases I probably overlooked 🙂

Happy Hacking!