[Evolution] Evolution, Components, and Authentication

["Joseph F. Dries III" <joseph dcsquared com>]

Greetings,

Let me apologize up-front for the length of this e-mail.

This is more of an infrastructure question I suppose, that would tend to
overlap into general GNOME topics. But I'm posting it here as it has just
as much, if not more, impact to Evolution as a groupware foundation.

Specifically, how will Identity's be handled, no so much in a an "I want
to handle different mailboxes as different users/preferences, such as
personal, professional, and helpdesk, etc.", but rather in authenticating
an identity.

Normally groupware identities are fairly strongly authenticated (Exchange
via NT domain accounts, Notes via their ID mechanism, etc.) Obviously if
you're publishing/subscribing your calendar, todo, and addressbook
information you will encounter situations where you may want to restrict
who has access to that, or more likely, situations where you want to take
different actions based on a level of trust. I wouldn't want an e-mailed
DoS attack to fill up my calendar, for example. I would only want meeting
requests to be acknowleged from a trusted, authenticatable source.

Integration and support of PGP, S/MIME, and PGP/MIME for standard e-mail
usage would then be available for little additional effort.

Which brings me to my question: will there be CORBA/Bonobo or some other
componentized interface in Evolution to a GNOME-available/aware "Personal
Security Manager" that handles things such as PGP keys and x.509
certificates.

Allowing this component to be tightly tied to Evolution I believe is
necessary, but I believe it should also be available to all the GNOME
aware applications. Imagine some of the possibilities:

. The ability, through Nautalus, to encrypt single files, groups of files,
  or even entire directory structures with a few mouce clicks (r-click,
  properties, X.509/GPG-encrypt, etc.)
. The ability tag a directory (and thus the whole structure) as
  auto-encrypt. Any application that was gnome-vfs aware would be able
  to save, access, or edit encrypted files w/o any modification.
. The ability to authenticate via SSLv3/TLS-1.0 through GtkHTML or
  gnome-moz widget browsers, such as Nautalus, etc.
. Providing the infrastructure for projects such FreeS/WAN to aquire
  personal certificates, to authenticate the user, not the machine.

Therefore a gnome-psm could expose and service a GNOME:Security:PGP and
GNOME:Security:X509, etc. type of identity services, with get/set,
authenticate, en/decrypt methods.

Just a few examples in an already long-winded e-mail.

-j

-- 
Joseph F. Dries III
President, DCsquared Inc. 
http://www.dcsquared.com/

 "You have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change 
  take effect."
    -- comment on NT uptime from poster on linux-ipsec