Re: GNU Crypto

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Sun, 2002-07-21 at 22:14, Raif S. Naffah wrote:
> Is therre an interest in incorporating the GNU Crypto library 
> <http://www.gnu.org/software/classpathx/crypto/crypto.html> in other GNU 
> project(s)?

Yes that would be nice. GNU Classpath (which is being merged with
libgcj) has a very basic Security Provider for SHA, MD5, DSA and a
simple Der reader/writer. I just fixed a couple of typos that prevented
some classes from ever getting actually loaded which indicates that they
are not really used much in real code and might be buggy. Do you have
testcases/programs for your package?

Mark Benvenuto wrote most of the java.security stuff but I don't know if
he is still around on the mailinglist. If he doesn't speak up on the
mailinglist you might want to contact him to ask about the status of the
current Classpath implementations (address@hidden or
address@hidden).

I don't know which crypto algorithms a java implementation should at
least support (I know the SHA MessageDigest is actually used for
serialVersionUIDs). But maybe we can import those into GNU Classpath
directly. It would make sense to at least add pointers to the GNU crypto
package to the documentation and make it as easy as possible for a user
that uses GNU Classpath with a certain VM to add the GNU crypto package
as an additional provider. For gcj it would be nice if GNU crypto was
available as a shared library that could just be installed by the user
to get access to the advanced cryptography classes. The security
provider architecture should make this easy but I have never done it
with any of the free VMs.

Note that I couldn't download the package since the links on your
homepage don't work (404 for the current version links) or don't provide
the actual distribution (for ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/classpathx).

Cheers,

Mark