encrypted file integration into KDE

[Roberto Alsina]

On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, George Staikos wrote:

> On April 27, 2002 13:46, Roberto Alsina wrote:
> > >    Yes.  That part as you see is easy.  The hard part is coming up with a
> > > flexible, reusable, appropriate crypto backend.  Something that won't
> > > confuse the user too much, but is safe and powerful, follows KDE
> > > development models, and is light.
> >
> > A candidate: libmcrypt
> >
> > http://mcrypt.hellug.gr/
> >
> > Uses standard algorithms (3DES, IDEA, etc, has a lot of them)
> >
> > There is already a CLI tool using it, so you could open the files outside
> > of KDE (that is a must).
> >
> > There is a library form, so it can be called from KDE.
> >
> > License is lgpl, so we can use it or tune it.
> >
> > It seems to be under active development (ie: not stagnant)
> 
>    Actually this library looks really good, and is exactly what we need (in 
> conjunction with libmhash).  I think we could easily make a manager to enable 
> and disable the various algorithms, and I'm sure we could make a good KDE 
> wrapper.  This one has my vote, and it would sure save us a lot of work.  It 
> looks very light.  Do you know how portable it is?  From the web page it 
> mentions Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.  I'm sure it's more portable than that, 
> but the random functions are an issue.  We don't want KDE falling back to 
> rand() under any circumstances.  I already deal with enough of these issues 
> with OpenSSL (~50% of all bug reports are random problems).

Well, then it is now a matter of finding a decent random generator
somewhere...

There is one in crypto++ ... maybe it can be ripped off, it is under a BSD
license, so there is no legal issue. I have no idea how good ir is, of
course.

>    Does this CLI tool deal with headers added to the file?  I don't see how we 
> can encrypt files without adding a header, and I'll be impressed to see that 
> this thing can jump over headers automatically.  Or do we encrypt and then 
> base64 encode the way PGP does?

I don´t think it does any headers (I am not in a linux box right now), but
even if it doesn´t, it could be added to it, since the sources look like
quite plain C.

The base64 stuff really bloats the files, although it does make it simple 
:-P

 ("\''/").__..-''"`-. .         Roberto Alsina
 `9_ 9  )   `-. (    ).`-._.`)  ralsina at kde.org
 (_Y_.)' ._   ) `._`.  " -.-'   KDE Developer (MFCH)
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(l)-'' ((i).' ((!.'             Buenos Aires - Argentina
I would like to believe in God [..]. But I just believe in Billy Wilder.