Re: GNU Crypto

[Raif S. Naffah]

hello Mark,

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> 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?

yes. there are JUnit test-cases for almost everything in the code --the 
test cases are in the test.* package hierarchy and get jarred in 
gnu-crypto-test.jar.  certain algorithms that do not have published test 
vectors are so marked in the page referrenced above.


> 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'll wait til the end of this week before contacting him.


> 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.

the main build tool for gnu.crypto is ANT but there are Makefile files 
to (a) use GNU Make for building the normal jars, and (b) build 
libraries with GCJ --Olivier is taking care of that part.  we are 
currently cleaning up those files for an eminent release.


> 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).

yes.  there is still no public release.  the only way to the sources, so 
far, is through CVS --a pointer is available from the project's home 
page above.


> Cheers,
>
> Mark


cheers;
rsn