Re: [GNU Crypto] Design overview of GNU Crypto?

[Raif S. Naffah]

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On Friday 28 March 2003 11:46, Casey Marshall wrote:
> Marcel Winandy wrote:
> | ...
> | I think your GNU Crypto Project is a very good idea. On the project
> | homepage is stated that there will be an implementation of IEEE
> | P1363 algorithms.  This is very interesting because I was involved
> | in developing a complete implementation of IEEE P1363 in the Java
> | programming language.  We had already some discussion about
> | distributing our library under the GPL license. But a dicision is
> | not made until today.

pls note that our license is GPL + Library exception; which is what's 
usually called the Guile License.


> | Now, I'm trying to understand your implementation in order to
> | figure out some possible cooperation or integration. Does any
> | documentation on a higher level than Java API-Doc exists? Some
> | design description or UML charts would be very useful to get a
> | quick overview.
> |
> | As far as I've seen you are supporting Sun's JCE architecture.  We
> | did not because of certain reasons...

indeed we do support the JCE but through Adapters (the gnu.crypto.jce 
sub-packages).  the GNU Crypto primitives _can_ be used on their own.  
the decision whether to use, or not the JCE is left to the user.


>... Our implementation was
> | "P1363-only", although AES was integrated as a fast symmetric
> | cipher algorithm and El-Gamal as a cipher algorithm based on
> | elliptic curves.
> |
> | In order to possibly help you and your project it would be a great
> | help for me if you had some more information about the design
> | aspects of GNU Crypto.  Of course, any help you could provide with
> | this P1363 beast would be greatly appreciated.
>
> A few months ago I started writing some TeXinfo documentation that
> gave a brief overview of GNU Crypto's API; it is far from complete,
> but may give a few hints at the library's overall structure:
>
> ~   http://metastatic.org/text/Documentation/gnu-crypto/
> ~   http://metastatic.org/text/Documentation/gnu-crypto/manual.html
> ~   http://metastatic.org/text/Documentation/gnu-crypto/manual.pdf
>
> This might not be exactly what you are looking for, but may help.
> Right now this document gives a general intro to the highest-level
> interface -- the various public interfaces and the factory classes.
> Note that this document is a rough draft and is NOT in any way
> official.

thanks Casey for this huge effort :-)  i'll try supplementing this with 
some UML diagrams.

Marcel, pls note also the current discussion taking place on the GNU 
Crypto discussion mailing list, starting from this thread, re. a higher 
level API: 
(http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-crypto-discuss/2003-03/msg00007.html).


cheers;
rsn
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