vanitasvitae's blog

The week of the first evaluation phase is here. This is the fourth week of GSoC – wow, time flew by quite fast this year 🙂 This week I plan to switch my OX implementation over to PGPainless in order to have a working prototype which can differentiate between sign, crypt and signcrypt elements. This…

In previous posts, I mentioned that I forked Bouncy-GPG to create PGPainless, which will be my simple to use OX/OpenPGP API. I have some news regarding that, since I made a radical decision. I’m not going to fork Bouncy-GPG anymore, but instead write my own OpenPGP library based on BouncyCastle. The new PGPainless will be…

As I stated earlier, I am working on a small XMPP command line test client, which is capable of sending and receiving OpenPGP encrypted messages. I just published a first version 🙂 Creating command line clients with Smack is super easy. You basically just create a connection, instantiate the manager classes of features you want…

The third week of coding is nearing its end and I’m quite happy with how my project turned out so far. The last two days I was ill, so I haven’t got anything done during that period, but since I started my work ahead of time during the boding period, I think I can compensate…

It has been a week since my last blog post, so it is time for an update. I successfully tested my OX client against an experimental Gajim plugin written by Philip Hörist. Big thanks for his help during the testing 🙂 My implementation can now backup the users secret key in a private PubSub node,…

BouncyCastle The mystery has been solved! I finally found out, why the OpenPGP keys I generated for my project had a broken format. Turns out, there was a bug in BouncyCastle. Big thanks to Heiko Stamer, who quickly identified the issue in the bug report I created for pgpdump, as well as Kazu Yamamoto and…

I noticed that my blog posting frequency is substantially higher than last year. For that reason I’ll try to keep this post shorter. Yesterday I implemented my first prototype code to encrypt and decrypt XEP-0374 messages! It can process incoming PubkeyElements (the published OpenPGP keys of other users) and create SigncryptElements which contain a signed…

The Coding Phase has begun! Unfortunately my first (official) day of coding was a bad start, as I barely added any new code. Instead I got stuck on a very annoying bug. On the bright side, I’m now writing a lengthy blog post for you all, whining about my issue in all depth. But first…

Yesterday I got my first results encrypting and decrypting OpenPGP messages using PGPainless, my fork of bouncy-gpg. There were some interesting hurdles that I want to discuss though. GnuPG As a first step towards working encryption and decryption, I obviously needed to create some PGP keys for testing purposes. As a regular user of OpenPGP…

OpenPGP OpenPGP (know as RFC4880) defines a format for encrypted and signed data, as well as encryption keys and signatures. My main problem with the specification is, that it is very noisy. The document is 90 pages long and describes every aspect an implementer needs to know about, from how big numbers are stored, over…