-
Summer of Code: Bug found!
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…
-
Summer of Code: Quick Update
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…
-
Summer of Code: The Plan. Act 1: OpenPGP, Part Two
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…
-
Summer of Code: Small steps
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…
-
Summer of Code: The plan. Act 1: 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…
-
Summer of Code: Preparations
During preparations for my GSoC project, I’m finding first traces left by developers who dealt with OpenPGP before. It seems that Florian was right when he noted, that there is a lack of usable higher level Java libraries as I found out when I stumbled across this piece of code. On the other hand I…
-
Starting to use the Fellowship Card
I recently became a fellow of the FSFE and so I received a nice letter containing the FSFE fellowship OpenPGP smartcard. After a quick visual examination I approved the card to be *damn cool*, even though the portrait format of the print of it still confuses me when I look at it. I especially like,…