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Google Summer of Code Wrap up: OpenKeychain

Friday, December 12, 2014

Today’s Google Summer of Code wrap up comes from Dominik Schürmann at OpenKeychain, a project helping Android users communicate securely.
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OpenKeychain helps you communicate more privately and securely. It uses high-quality modern encryption to ensure that your messages can be read only by the people you send them to, others can send you messages that only you can read, and these messages can be digitally signed so the people getting them are sure who sent them. OpenKeychain is based on the well established OpenPGP standard making encryption compatible across your devices and operating systems.

This was OpenKeychain’s first year participating in the Google Summer of Code program. We received two student slots, which we gratefully assigned to the best applicants. Their work was released as part of OpenKeychain 2.8.
Vincent Breitmoser worked on the cryptographic backend of OpenKeychain which is based on the low-level library Bouncy Castle. He rewrote almost all methods related to key operations and changed the way results are handled to allow a user-readable log of what actually has been processed. He also made the methods testable by dividing the backend into methods requiring Android and Java-only methods. Java-only crypto operations are now tested automatically using Travis CI.

mar-v-in worked on better integration of OpenKeychain into the Android OS, including better support for file encryption/decryption using Android 4.4 features. Now encrypting multiple files is possible using the Storage Access Framework. He also worked on an integration with Android's contact application by connecting contacts to keys in OpenKeychain by using email addresses as identifiers.

By Dominik Schürmann, Organization Administrator, OpenKeychain

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