Proposal for Seahorse inclusion in GNOME 2.18

[Nate Nielsen <nielsen-list memberwebs com>]

Seahorse is a encryption key manager for GNOME. It currently 'manages'
PGP and SSH keys (work has been done on X.509 certificates [1]).

The Seahorse developers would like to propose Seahorse 0.9.x for
inclusion in GNOME. It offers:

libcryptui
  * An API for querying the keys on the system, searching key servers,
    widgets to select keys.
  * D-Bus based.

Key Manager
  * Creation of SSH keys and GPG keys
  * Configuration of keys, import, export etc..
  * The interface and concepts for users are getting simpler
    and clearer with each release.
  * gnome-keyring integration for GnuPG and OpenSSH
  * HKP and LDAP key server integration
  * SSH key authorization and upload

Plugins
  * File encryption (nautilus plugin)
  * Text encryption (gedit plugin)
  * A panel-applet for those with special clipboard encryption needs.

Other
  * Rendezvous based key sharing to share a pool of keys on a network

The Seahorse developers' long term goal is to make encryption easy to
use within GNOME. Besides filling a need for a key manager, inclusion in
GNOME would help us realize that goal. For example:

  * EDS Address book integration
  * About-me: 'my' encryption key selection
  * More intelligent trust metrics based on frequency of use

Suggestions for how Seahorse can improve are welcome, as are ideas for
making encryption easier for users. Taking a look at a recent seahorse
release will help your comments that much more insightful:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/seahorse/0.9/seahorse-0.9.4.tar.gz

Cheers,
Nate Nielsen


[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351858