After having hinted at it now and then, I can finally gladly announced that we (GNOME Keyring + KDE Wallet) managed to kick off a joint freedesktop.org project with the goal of creating a common infrastructure (or more technically: protocol) for managing passwords and other secret values.
I expect several benefits for our users:
- They will be able to securely store their secrets. Even if they use a mix of different applications (GNOME, KDE even plain Qt) they will only have one background service to authenticate to.
- They will be able to switch your browser without having to reenter your passwords if the browser supports the API - unfortunately no word from Mozilla if they're interested.
If you're an application developer, don't worry. While I expect a new client-side API (which I imagine to be more OO style than KWallet::Wallet), I'll keep an eye on providing something the current class can wrap so even applications using the old API will be able to use the new system.
In case you're interested in joining the drafting process, you can find the current working draft as well as more information inside the freedesktop wiki.
