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.
