Re: conceptual questions

[Adam Schreiber <sadam clemson edu>]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 5:20 PM, Thomas Stover <thomas wsinnovations com> wrote:
> While browsing around to see if something exists before I start yet another
> thing to maintain, I found seahorse. I'm looking for something that holds
> keys (or even raw passwords) in a background process volatilely. Then client
> applications "set" and "get" keys to it. Just like ssh-agent except having
> some means of actually getting the keys and/or passwords.

This functionality is part of gnome-keyring.  Seahorse provides a
frontend to secrets stored in a gnome-keyring keyring.  Permanent
secrets can be stored in a keyring that can be unlocked at login and
temporary secrets can be stored in a session keyring.

> Or at least be
> able to send it some arbitrary data for it to decrypt and securely pass back
> to a client. Is something like this part of seahorse? Any one know of
> something that is? A reusable solution to this seems to obvious a need for
> somebody not to have already solved it.

This is similar to the handshaking that ssh does.  I don't know of any
general purpose code that does that though.  libgcrypt has many of the
cryptographic ciphers, hashes and signature algorithms already
implemented and I would discourage you from writing your own versions.

Cheers,

Adam