[Glass] Current state of Cryptography?

[Dale Henrichs]

Iwan,

It looks like GsDevKit/Cryptography has not been touched in 6 years ... 
about 4 months ago, I enabled the travis CRON jobs for the project, but 
the project had not been updated to use smalltalkCI, so the builds were 
failing from the get go ... I've been busy with other projects since 
then and figured I'd worry about  GsDevKit/Cryptography if/when someone 
expressed interest in the project ...

It's easy enough for me to update the .travis.yml file to use 
SmalltalkCI at which point we can see the state of the current project 
relative to the more recent versions of GemStone, however, the code 
hasn't been touched in 6 years ...

I am not a cryptography person, so I cannot judge whether or not the 
code from 6 years ago (at least) is still relevant today.

The last time the pharo-contributions/Cryptography was touched was 
touched in July, so I would assume that this project is more up-to-date. 
The  pharo-contributions/Cryptography project was converted from 
Filetree to tonel format last July, so it isn't practical to add 
GemStone support to the project at the present time ...

It would be relatively easy to copy the code in the 
pharo-contributions/Cryptography to a branch on the 
GsDevKit/Cryptography project and convert back to Filetree form (using 
Rowan) ... of course the projects would have to be re-ported to GemStone.

I don't have the cycles to do any major porting work, but if there are 
folks that are interested in having the whole library or bits and pieces 
ported to GemStone, I can certainly help ...

I see that X509 is part of the Cryptography project and I believe that 
X509 is supported in 3.5.x.

At the end of the day, if there is something that is in the Cryptography 
project that you need and it is not present in GemStone, then the best 
route would certainly be to bring the library up-to-date and port it to 
GemStone ... getting the project under travis using smalltalkci, would 
mean that I would be willing and able to maintain the functionality of 
the library on subsequent moving forward as new versions of GemStone are 
released ...

So it is up to you and/or anyone else to put an oar in the water and 
determine which parts of the project are good as they are and/or do a 
wholesale fresh port of based on the pharo-contributions/Cryptography 
project.

I will convert the project to smalltalkCI and update the .travis.yml to 
include more recent versions of GemStone, so the state of the current 
library can be evaluated ...

Dale

On 9/28/20 6:18 AM, Iwan Vosloo via Glass wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been googling a bit to try and figure out what the current 
> state of of cryptography is, but I am left lost....
>
> I see https://github.com/pharo-contributions/Cryptography which seems 
> alive and well, but it does not look like it supports GemStone, or am 
> I mistaken?
>
> https://github.com/GsDevKit/Cryptography looks like a GemStone port 
> for it, but I'm not sure whether that project is active.
>
> I've also seen people refer here and there to using the OS level 
> libraries, presumably via FFI.
>
> What is the recommended libs to use for this sort of thing in 
> Gemstone? (Or, even better - what can you use realiably in both 
> Gemstone and Pharo?)
>
> Regards
> Iwan
>
>