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

[Erik Grinaker <erikg wired-networks net>]

On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 11:14, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 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.
> > 
> > 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.

Ok, right... Well, since it's not tree-structured I don't think I will
be writing Revelation as a front-end for it - a tree structure is very
handy when organizing even a moderate number of accounts.

But I could do some sort of synchronization between accounts in
revelation and those in the keyring. I'm going to implement an
import/export infrastructure in Revelation for version 0.3.x, and will
probably add a backend for im/exporting to the keyring.


> 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 might be interested in doing this - it would be a cool project for
learning to program in C. It won't be until Revelation has matured a bit
though, so don't hold your breath. Maybe I can get something ready for
GNOME 2.8, if noone else has started it by then.


> > 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.

Cool, maybe I'll have a look at it when I start working on
import/export.


-- 
Erik Grinaker <erikg wired-networks net>
http://erikg.wired-networks.net/

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of
life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be
enthusiastic about."
                                                      -- Albert Einstein