KWallet integration
Martijn Klingens
klingens at kde.org
Thu Sep 4 12:16:46 BST 2003
On Thursday 04 September 2003 12:52, Rob Kaper wrote:
> Applications like Atlantik, Konqueror and Kopete are trusted only because
> we *know* what security procedures are in place and judge them to be
> sufficient.
Do we? How many people know that Kopete stored passwords in plain text up to
and including 0.6.x? How many people know that the seemingly secure
"encrypted" password in 0.7.x is only a dead simple hash that can be
circumvented easily? Only a handful of security-conscious people like you
know that. KWallet's 'secure by default' encryption would solve the problem
for real, because it brings actual secure storage to people who don't even
know what encryption is.
> If the KWallet API would allow for creditcard data to be given
> to any of these applications just because I unlocked my IM passwords, then
> I would not consider KWallet trusted for the purpose of storing sensitive
> data such as creditcards.
Why not? If you distrust an application you can just as well distrust the
entire system, since an untrusted application can just as well install a key
logger and pass a separate 'credit card password' to whoever is interested.
So either you trust the application and you can just as well put everything in
the same wallet, or you don't, but then you should not even USE the
application in the first place, with wallet or not.
--
Martijn
More information about the kde-core-devel
mailing list