PIN-Entry

[Matthias Kalle Dalheimer]

On Tuesday 23 October 2001 17:35, Werner Koch wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I have just defined the protocol used to communicate with the
> PIN-Entry - pretty simple indeed (assuan-pinentry.txt in the
> aegypten-specs module).
>
> Because the PIn-Entry is a small GUI utility we can just fork and exec
> it whenever we need some interaction.  This makes the communication
> pretty easy, as we only need to use 2 pipes for it - actually this
> will be stdin and stdout of course.
>
> I have thought again about the issue of passphrase caching and came to
> the result that it is better to let the gpg-agent (who invoked the
> PIN-Entry) do that.  For various reasons, the gpg-agent has to stay in
> memory anyway and is therefore the best place to keep some sensitive
> sesion data.
>
> It might be best to write it as a standalone QT utility without a need
> for any KDE libs - it has to grab keyboard and mouse anyway, so it
> does not matter whether it has all the nice KDE standard features.  In
> fact it should not have them and cut+paste should not be possible.

I agree. That also makes it possible to reuse it on other platforms like=20
MacOS X.

We probably even want to link Qt statically to it so that nobody can mess=
=20
around with LD_PRELOAD...

Kalle

--=20
Matthias Kalle Dalheimer
President & CEO Klar=E4lvdalens Datakonsult AB
Platform-independent Software Solutions
http://www.klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se