Re: [GNU Crypto] JKS and reverse engineering

[Casey Marshall]

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On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 04:32:51PM +0200, Mark Wielaard wrote:

> On Sat, 2003-06-21 at 13:03, Casey Marshall wrote:
> > I've been working on an implementation of the JKS keystore algorithm,
> > which is Sun's proprietary keystore format. I have done this by
> > reverse engineering Sun's implementation.
> 
> Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
> 
> > What is the position here with regard to reverse engineering? If there
> > is no problem then should GNU Crypto include this class? 
> 
> We want to provide people with a free platform that they can migrate to
> when they are currently locked into a proprietary implementation. If
> reverse engineering is the only way to provide this then I personally
> think that it should be perfectly fine to do it.
> 
> But since the FSF distributes GNU Crypto as an official GNU package it
> is best just to ask their position on this (they do take some legal risk
> by providing the official packages). I suggest just forwarding your
> message in which you explain how you reverse engineered the
> algorithm/file format (and why it is important for us to provide this to
> free software developers) to Richard Stallman and ask him whether the
> FSF wants to distribute this as part of GNU Crypto or that it is more
> appropriate to only link to the free implementation on you homepage.
> 

Is it appropriate to bug RMS about this? I would have assumed that the
FSF would have a place to ask questions like this, but I can't find
anything.

> (There is even the option to take your human readable description of the
> format and let someone else reimplement it from scratch if that gets
> around any legal issues. If that is the case I volunteer to do that
> work.)
> 

And in the case that someone is looking for an English description, it
is embedded in the JavaDocs: <http://metastatic.org/source/JKS.html>

- -- 
Casey Marshall || address@hidden
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