Re: [9fans] gnupg or pgp for plan9?

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

somehow you understood the opposite of what i ment.
the point is that using encrypted/signed s/mime with upas
should be transparent.  i would think the easiest way to do that would
be to do the translation as  close to the edges of the system as possible.
those edges would be upas/fs -- which presents a mail box as a filesystem
and upas/marshal which builds an rfc-2822 message for sending.

i had not thought of using s/mime for general encrypted storage.
mime is not a particularly friendly or easy-to-parse format.
i would think that using, say, blowfish in cbc mode would be
plenty compatable.  mcrypt/mhash (http://(mcrypt|mhash).sourceforge.net/),
for example, could decrypt this on a unix-like machine.
(not that either is svelt.)

what would be the advantage of using s/mime outside of email?

- erik

On Tue Mar 28 09:00:28 EST 2006, anothy@gmail.com wrote:
> Erik Quanstrom wrote:
> // i think a better route would be to build s/mime compatable signatures
> // and encryption into upas/fs and upas/marshal so applications without
> // a need to know would not have to know.
>
> i'm not really sure what you mean by that. certainly we shouldn't
> require the content-producing programs (like, say, 'cat') to know
> anything about encryption, but that idea's already totally foreign to
> plan 9 (cat --enable-encryption-with-aes-cbc?).
>
> having s/mime in upas would be wonderful, but doesn't fully address
> the needs being discussed. i want to be able to store files on disk
> securely, including across platforms. for that, i want a stand-alone
> program (hopefully, one which could then be used in upas).