I’ll be attending GUADEC for the first time. Not only that but I’ll be giving a talk. I’m a bit nervous, but excited!
The talk is about integrating various applications using keys and certificates to use a common key storage.
Currently each application puts their certificates and private keys in distinct locations, which make it hard for the user, but also for application developers, since new applications integrating crypto need to work out a whole raft of things such as secure key storage.
- Currently when you need to use a certificate with network-manager and a wireless connection, you have to specify three files in a fragile formats.
- When using certificates with evolution or firefox or thunderbird each application stores them in their own key storage.
- SSH Keys (which are in fact the same
sort as the above) are stored in
~/.ssh
It’s a little bit like each application not sharing a filesystem, but having their own part of the disk to write their documents to. With GPG we have all applications sharing the same keyring (per-user obviously), but so far this hasn’t been the case with X.509 certificates and keys.
Because of the development in gnome-keyring around a standard called PKCS#11 it’s now possible to integrate the key storage between applications, and in our talk we’ll discuss how to do this in a secure, transparent and configurable way.
This also means it’ll be easier for applications to gain support for keys, and to have smart card related features and other stuff like that in the future.