Integrating Crypto Identities with Android

ver the past couple of years, Android has included a central database for managing information about people, it is known as the ContactsContract (that’s a mouthful). Android then provides the People app and reusable interface chunks to choose contacts that work with all the information in the ContactsContract database. Any time that you are adding an account in the Settings app, you are setting up this integration. You can see it with Google services, Skype, Facebook, and many more. [Read More]

Getting keys into your keyring with Gnu Privacy Guard for Android

Now that you can have a full GnuPG on your Android device with Gnu Privacy Guard for Android, the next step is getting keys you need onto your device and included in Gnu Privacy Guard. We have tried to make it as easy as possible without compromising privacy, and have implemented a few approaches, while working on others. There are a few ways to get this done right now. Gnu Privacy Guard registered itself with Android as a handler of all the standard OpenPGP MIME types (application/pgp-keys, application/pgp-encrypted, application/pgp-signature), as well as all of the OpenPGP and GnuPG file extensions (. [Read More]

GnuPG for Android progress: we have an command line app!

This alpha release of our command-line developer tool brings GnuPG to Android for the first time! GNU Privacy Guard Command-Line (gpgcli) gives you command line access to the entire GnuPG suite of encryption software. GPG is GNU’s tool for end-to-end secure communication and encrypted data storage. This trusted protocol is the free software alternative to PGP. GnuPG 2.1 is the new modularized version of GnuPG that now supports OpenPGP and S/MIME. [Read More]

Sometimes the best solution is a library, not an app

Our general approach to software development starts with surveying existing solutions that are available and in use, to see if there is already enough of an ecosystem or whether we need to seed that. When there is already an adundance of tools and apps out there, we work to find the good ones, provide feedback and auditing, and then build apps and tools to fill in any gaps. For example, this was our approach in the Open Secure Telephony Network. [Read More]

Adventures in Porting: GnuPG 2.1.x to Android!

PGP started with Phil Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy, which is now turned into an open IETF standard known as OpenPGP. These days, the reference OpenPGP platform seems to be GnuPG: its used by Debian and all its derivatives in the OS itself for verifying packages and more. It is also at the core of all Debian development work, allowing the very diffuse body of Debian, Ubuntu, etc developers to communicate and share work effectively while maintaining a high level of security. [Read More]