On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Gustavo Medeiros <[email protected]>wrote:

> Hi Brian,
> - Do you now why AID_SYSTEM is not given the permission to read
> certificates (~GET)?
>

My guess is just that there was a desire to have the minimum permissions
possible. System had no use case for read, so it was disallowed. A similar
decision led to the CertInstaller being a separate app so that it could have
permission to read the sdcard, which the system user can't do either
apparently.


> - And also why are the public certificates stored encrypted? This
> prevents the system from displaying the contents of the certificates
> to the user, other platforms only encrypt the private key.
>

I assume its because it was just designed as an opaque store that tried not
to have any semantics about what it was storing, which I agree was a
mistake, but something that didn't matter for the VPN and WiFi uses cases.


> - Browser and Email get the certificates from cacerts.bks to use in
> SSL, Wi-Fi and VPN cannot use these CA certs in their authentication
> process, the reverse case happens with Browser and Email, they cannot
> use user-installed CA certs. Is there some reason for the keystores
> not being unified?
>

the keystore was written by the VPN guys and then expanded for use in WiFi,
all a huge pile of C code. The browser and email and in Java and the default
TrustManager implementation used a keystore for its CA certs.

There are many public issues about this, I've tried to bring them together
into one feature request here:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=11231

-bri

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