Qt Cryptographic Architecture

[George Staikos]

On Tuesday 06 January 2004 14:24, Justin Karneges wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 January 2004 09:34 am, you wrote:
> > > For SSL, you would use QCA::TLS, which has very similar behavior to my
> > > older QSSLFilter (and also Trolltech's recent QtSSLFilter, which they
> > > based on my original concept).
> >
> >    This won't mesh with KIO very well.
>
> Hmm, how so?  Is KIO more like QIODevice than QSocket?

  KIO uses the raw socket file descriptor and *tries* to be lightweight.  For 
instance the slave classes are not QObjects.

> >    We already have a SASL implementation too.  Is it conceivable to
> > reduce it to a more lightweight implementation of just the algorithms? 
> > OpenSSL is very expensive to load just to get access to, say, MD5.
>
> Yes, it is only for simplicity on my part that I lumped all of that into
> one plugin.  You could easily make a plugin that implements only MD5, or a
> plugin that implements only hash functions, etc.

   Ok this is basically what I started to implement as well.  It is generally 
useful, but we don't really have enough need for this yet IMHO.  We should 
keep your implementation in mind for the time when we do.

   Some other notes:
   - Using OpenSSL should be avoided for hash and cipher plugins because it's 
very big and expensive to load
   - As far as KDE is concerned right now, we basically only use MD5, with a 
couple of bits of code using SHA-1, and one place using Blowfish.  This is 
why it's not worth loading a full crypto architecture yet.  Eventually it 
will be very useful though.

  Thank you.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/