Quote from: Newton on August 04, 2011, 07:40:34 PM

What are the issues you're finding? I know there are open source javascript encryption libraries, but I haven't researched how well they perform or are vetted.

The problems may be entirely due to my paranoia which assumes the host cannot be trusted so communications must be done in such a way that the host gains limited information even when compromised. But at the same time, the system cannot be so draconian that it wouldn't work at all Cheesy

Currently, I've been looking into the various encryption possible, e.g. OpenPG -> RSA/AES and Blowfish/Twofish (allows changing key length) if necessary. One issue is that in Javascript, the encryption process will be slow and there apparently isn't any complete library to do the whole public/private key thing. Most of them assumes we would only want to encrypt and send to a trusted server, a lot of them also rely on having access to an OpenSSL service to generate key pairs, although I found one source for doing this in-browser, it needs to be adapted to eliminate inherent weakness in the JS random generator.

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Given that you can interact with the user, accept the password, etc entirely within the browser, and assuming that a suitable and trusted existing encryption library can be used, the rest is just standard ajax between js/server. A lot of work of course, but no new ground.

I think you're right that we should work on the common browser front end and treat the JS code as inherently separate from the backend code (we'd define an API I suppose). I would prefer the JS to be hosted separate from the server operator, but I would still accept a one host system, since its still a big step forward. But as long the browser front end is treated separately, its the right road map.

The front end definitely should be open sourced and flexible, I was thinking more of a reference API built on top of library of core functions. This would allow custom front end by implementing custom top level functions to replace the reference API without the need to change the core functions. The core functions could be hosted on public servers, which reduces the amount of "suspicious" code to be verified to only the custom frontend.

We might be getting seriously off topic for this sub-board though Cheesy