Hi!

On 2014-02-19 21:43, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
>> What do you think about that?  Would it be too complicated a workflow?
>>  I personally would welcome a feature like this inside of Enigmail.
>> But as mentioned, if you believe this should be added to GnuPG itself
>> instead, I'll ask the GnuPG people about their opinion.
> 
> There's a serious bootstrapping problem here.
> 
> Enigmail's mission statement: "We provide a convenient front-end to
> GnuPG's OpenPGP functionality.  No more and no less."
> 
> GnuPG's mission statement: "We provide implementations of OpenPGP
> (RFC4880) and S/MIME (RFC5721).  No more and no less."

Ok, I see....  So you don't think that Enigmail would want to add some
extra functionality over GnuPG's OpenPGP stuff?

> I don't know enough about Namecoin to talk intelligently about it. 
> However, until Namecoin becomes a part of either RFC4880 or RFC5721, it
> is unlikely to be supported within either GnuPG or Enigmail.

Of course we could try to become an official part of OpenPGP.  However,
it seems out of scope for me.  OpenPGP is fine just as it is, Namecoin
is just an alternative way to validate fingerprints.

The only way how this could fit into the scope of OpenPGP itself I see
at the moment is this:  Allow a key / UID to specify a Namecoin name it
belongs to with some special additional field or so (I don't yet know
enough about OpenPGP internals to know how this could be done
explicitly), and specify the procedure how an OpenPGP implementation can
validate the fingerprint based on the specified name.

Do you think this is an extension that could eventually be accepted into
OpenPGP?  While this would be really cool, I doubt it at least for the
forseeable future.  (I'm not familiar with how IETF standardisation
works, though.)

> The best way to proceed, I think, would be to set up a keyserver that
> could interact with a Namecoin back-end and communicate over the
> existing HKP protocol.  If you can get people using Namecoin through a
> shim like that, then over time you might be able to get people to use
> Namecoin directly.

Hm... how would that work?  I could query the key server for "id/domob"
and the server would look up the key specified in this Namecoin name for
me and send it?  Would that be possible with the HKP protocol?  Or
something else?

The problem with this approach is, however, that especially in the
Bitcoin/Namecoin community, centralised servers are not very welcome and
many (me included) see the point of Namecoin as precisely getting rid of
such servers one has to trust.  Thus at least the ultimate goal is
definitely to have verification done locally on one's machine.  (Of
course, one could instead possibly set up a local HKP server ... but
this sounds like a very overcomplicated setup to me.)

On 2014-02-19 21:47, Kelly John Rose wrote:
> Or possibily forking Enigmail to build it as a subextension.

Is it possible to build an extension that hooks onto Enigmail and
integrates into Enigmail's UI?  If yes, then this sounds like a good way
forward.  If no and I would really have to fork Enigmail, maintain it in
sync with upstream and provide my own builds / releases, then it sounds
like overkill to set up a whole parallel Enigmail for the sake of adding
a relatively simple patch to it.

Yours,
Daniel

-- 
http://www.domob.eu/
OpenPGP: 901C 5216 0537 1D2A F071  5A0E 4D94 6EED 04F7 CF52
Namecoin: id/domob -> https://nameid.org/?name=domob
--
Done:  Arc-Bar-Cav-Hea-Kni-Ran-Rog-Sam-Tou-Val-Wiz
To go: Mon-Pri

_______________________________________________
enigmail-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://admin.hostpoint.ch/mailman/listinfo/enigmail-users_enigmail.net

Reply via email to