Hi, Firstly, sorry I haven't been quite as vocal as I could have. As it seems with most people, our term hasn't finished yet, and I've also had to sort our where I'm living afterwards (notwithstanding the fact that both our Internet connection and electricity both decided to take a day off last week). It will all be over soon and I'll be able to concentrate on important things!
So far, the progress on Freemail is: General: - Testing the initial nim-mode with rguerra. Verified to work between our two systems. Also fixed a bug with temporary files ending up on different partitions. Protocol & Crypto: - Create and store all the information to go in the mailsites - Automatically upload the mailsites - Lots of research on public key crypto. Investigation of what's best to use in Java as far as this goes. Quite a lot of fiddling with with a test program trying bouncycastle and GNU crypto's APIs, as well as native Java crypto. Attempts with both using the API directly and through the JCE. Never got the JCE to work simply and reliably with external crypto providers (native Java 1.4 is very lacking in public key algorithms) - Imported bouncycastle's lightweight crypto API, which appears to be the simplest and most robust solution that maintains compatibility with Java 1.4. - Decided on RSA as an encryption algorithm (proven, now freely available and has an implementation at least in Java 1.5) - Got RSA signing and encryption working in a test program - Read all about naive sign and encrypt, surreptitious forwarding, and the like. - Start on the sending of RTS messages. Now mostly done, and just needs some debugging. Made resilient to network failures and designed to expect that inserting a message may take several attempts. - Some debate on Freemail addresses. No conclusion on these as of yet (see tech list.) What's still to do: - Write full protocol documentation, specifying order, format and encryption of messages. Build in acknowledgement messages since simulations suggest that not every messages inserted will be retrievable between a single sender and recipient. - Finish the protocol - RTS Messages, CTS messages, the emails, and ACKs. - Better IMAP support - Simple and intuitive front end for users. Potentally webmail for those less confident setting up an email client with nonstandard ports / multiple accounts, in which case may consider integration with the node / plugin in order to avoid having two separate web interfaces. So that's the progress so far. I'm hoping to get a fair amount done this week, although I'll be moving house on the Friday and hence without an Internet connection for however long an ADSL activation period is these days. Dave
