I know, I’m always a bit late. Just a few minutes ago, I came across Ciphire Mail. They — a company from Munich, Germany — claim to have created a convenient crypto-system for email communication. It is a proxy solution for POP3, IMAP, and SMTP. The crypto part relies on the common ciphers (symm and asymm) and signature algoritms. It is positioned as an easy-to-use alternative to PGP and S/MIME.

Has anybody intalled it? I’ll give it a try the next weeks… let’s see what this marketing drivel is all about :)

On thursday I gave my second talk at the third Kryptotag in Darmstadt. It was as interesting as the last time. A really great idea to organize something like this in Germany, particularly because security and cryptology is a bit underrepresented here.

I’ve put the slides and the abstract here.

I’m currently investigating Mono.Cairo for some projects I’m involved to. Since there’s no to easy to use Cairo-based canvas element available at the moment, I’m about to create a simple new one. During the last two days I got stuck at a memory leak: once I moved some element on my pretty, pretty, pretty simple canvas field, all my memory got eaten up. I’ve checked every piece of code — it’s not that much, only a few lines so far :) — but it seemed to be an issue with the Cairo-Mono-binding I found somewhere on the Internet.

Today, just some minutes ago, I decided to search some mailinglists and newsgroup for this problem et voilà, here’s the solution: http://…/gmane.comp.gnome.mono.summer-of-code/163. Michał Dominik K., the developer of DIVA and a participant of the Summer of Code project of the Mono effort, published the solution in the coordination list. Thanks! :)

Starting with 2.8 the GTK library natively supports Cairo. The function gdk\_cairo\_create(GdkDrawable *) creates a surface with no memory leakage :). The full source for Gdk.Graphics is shown below. It’s linux-only for now.

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using Cairo;

namespace Gdk
{
	public class Graphics
	{
		private Graphics() {}

		[DllImport("libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0")]
		internal static extern IntPtr gdk_cairo_create(
                IntPtr handle);

		public static Cairo.Graphics CreateDrawable(
                Gdk.Drawable drawable)
		{
            return new Cairo.Graphics(
                    gdk_cairo_create(drawable.Handle));
		}
	}
}

Wednesday morning. No clouds. It’s warm outside. I decide to read up on some papers accepted at workshops and meetings. They’re dealing with cryptography. Cryptography is cool by the way.

Then, out of the blue there appears a paper. It’s title reads very similar to the one I’ve written. I click on it, store it, and I read it. Even the content is very similar. The workshop and the meeting on which the paper was accepted took place about two months ago. Hmmm… shit :)

It’s not funny when you realize that somebody else had a similar idea only two months ago. I even had a job interview at this department back in autumn last year. That’s funny. Maybe they’re interested in a cooperation? I’m a bit more interested in network communication, group communication, in unrealiable environments, in adaptation in communication scenarios. And of course: security (thus confidentiality, integrity, availability) in there.

Hhmmmm. I feel a bit strange — just as I did the last days. Let’s see what’s coming next. On thursday next week (15. Sept. 2005) I give a short talk at the Kryptotag in Darmstadt. It’s about my project. Hhmmmm.