Re: [rvl-devel] Re: Revelation 0.1.0 released

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 18:47, Erik Grinaker wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 17:29, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 00:07, Erik Grinaker wrote:
> > > Revelation is a password manager for the GNOME 2 desktop. It organizes
> > > accounts in a tree-structure, and stores them as AES-encrypted XML. This
> > > is the first release, with most basic functionality in place.
> >
> > Interesting... How does this relate to gnome-keyring, which is part of
> > of Gnome 2.5? It seems to be similar, although not identical. And
> > gnome-keyring doesn't have a UI yet apart from the integration with the
> > password dialog and the authentication dialog.
> 
> Hm, I actually haven't heard about gnome-keyring until now - but it
> would be really cool to somehow integrate Revelation with it.
> 
> I've only read the description of gnome-keyring in the module proposal,
> so I don't know too much of the details. But if gnome-keyring can be
> used as a general-purpose password storage system, with support for a
> tree-structure for accounts and custom attributes (such as the CCV
> number for credit cards), there shouldn't be any reason not to use it as
> the data backend.

Its not tree-structured. Each keyring is just an unordered collection of
secret items each with a unique type/name. However, it is general
purpose in that any app can add GNOME_KEYRING_ITEM_GENERIC_SECRET items
(or GNOME_KEYRING_ITEM_NOTE for things meant for user use instead of app
use), and each item has attributes that are arbitrary name/value(string
or int) sets.

One feature currently lacking in gnome-keyring is the keyring manager
UI, where you can view keyrings, lock & unlock them, delete items, add
encrypted notes, etc. I hope I will be able to write this, or find
someone else to do it in the future. 
Essentially, we'd want a Gnome version of the Keychain Access
application at:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Security/Conceptual/keychainServConcepts/02concepts/chapter_2_section_4.html#CJBBJHHG

> I'd be very interested in integrating Revelation with it. Revelation is
> currently written in Python, but I guess I could rewrite it in C unless
> Python bindings for gnome-keyring are made available soon (it's about
> time to start learning C anyways :)).

Wrapping libgnomekeyring in python should be pretty easy too.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an obese Catholic dwarf with a robot buddy named Sparky. She's a scantily 
clad psychic angel with her own daytime radio talk show. They fight crime!