I noticed that my blog posting frequency is substantially higher than last year. For that reason I’ll try to keep this post shorter.

Yesterday I implemented my first prototype code to encrypt and decrypt XEP-0374 messages! It can process incoming PubkeyElements (the published OpenPGP keys of other users) and create SigncryptElements which contain a signed and encrypted payload. On the receiving side it can also decrypt those messages and verify the signature.

I’m still puzzled about why I’m unable to dump the keys I generate using pgpdump. David Hook from Bouncycastle used my code to generate a key and it worked flawlessly on his machine, so I’m stumped for an answer…

I created a bug report about the issue on the pgpdump repository. I hope that we will get to the cause of the issue soon.

Changes to the schedule

In my original proposal I sketched out a timeline which is now (that I already making huge steps) a little bit underwhelming. The plan was initially to work on Smacks PubSub API within the first two weeks.
Florian suggested, that instead I should create a working prototype of my implementation as soon as possible, so I’m going to modify my schedule to meet the new criteria:

My new plan is, to have a fully working prototype implementation at the time of the first evaluation (june 15th).
That prototype (implemented within a small command line test client) will be capable of the following things:

• Storing keys in a rudimental form on disk
• automatically creating keys if needed
• publishing public keys via PubSub
• fetching contacts keys when needed
• encrypting and signing messages
• decrypting and verifying and displaying incoming messages

The final goal is still to create a sane, modular implementation. I’m just slightly modifying the path that will take me there 🙂

Happy Hacking!