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55 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
55 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
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# Design Notes on Open-Keychain
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This document contains notes on the software design of open keychain.
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## Database design
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The database has two distinct types of tables:
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- The key\_ring\_{public,secret} tables, which hold binary blobs of all known
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public and private keys, respectively, and nothing else.
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- All other tables, which cache information about key rings in a consistent
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manner. This information includes various pieces of metadata about each key's
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subkeys, user ids, and certificates.
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### Constraints
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All tables in the database have FOREIGN KEY constraints related to the
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key\_ring\_public table. This is also true for the key\_ring\_secret table,
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which means that secret keys cannot exist in the database without their public
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key counterparts. This has implications in particular on the order of insertion
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for private key rings and their public key ring counterparts into the database,
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even more so when editing a key ring is edited.
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### Cache usage considerations
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It is of note that extraction of metadata from key rings is in some cases a
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surprisingly expensive operation. As a prime example (heh), properly extracting
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a key's associated primary user id requires examination and possibly
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verification of all self-certificates, which in turn requires examination of
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all certificates.
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To ensure consistency, each type of metadata must be extracted one way in
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exactly one routine. For this reason, it is often desirable to make use of
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cached data even when the underlying pgp key ring objects are contextually
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available.
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## Further work / WIP
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### Separation of concerns
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Roughly speaking, the crypto code should be strictly separated from the android
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code. At the time of this writing (30.04.14), most of these thoughts are yet to
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be put into practice.
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There are three aspects to OK which should be kept largely separate:
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- Firstly, there is Code dealing with pgp and crypto. This code exclusively makes
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use of the BouncyCastle library. It lives in the .pgp package.
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- Secondly, there is code dealing with user interface and system integration,
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which makes exclusive use of Android classes.
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- Between these, there is glue code that is responsible for mapping pgp objects
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to the database, and calling methods provided by the crypto code from the ui
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code.
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