fd.o secret storage project

nospam@example.com (Michael Leupold) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:38:06 +0200

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.

KDE Wallet improvements in 4.2

nospam@example.com (Michael Leupold) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:52:24 +0100

Albeit having the kwallet category on my blog for quite a while now, I never really bothered to put anything in there. With the advent of KDE 4.2 I thought I'd share what I've been up to.

Bad news first...

Unfortunately I didn't quite get around improving the manager. I actually planned and started this but other things seemed more pressing. Thus KDE 4.2's kwalletmanager will continue to be not-quite-pretty

Good news for everyone

Some things have happened under the hood though. I've mostly been busy fixing bugs, including long withstanding ones like concurrency issues and lockups. Changes and fixes include:

kwalletd has moved from kdelibs/kio to kdebase/runtime (actually pretty much invisible to anyone but packagers)
Improved open wallet calls: Open calls can no longer timeout, open Path uses asynchroneous transaction handling.
Detect exiting/crashing applications: The daemon will now detect applications that exit without closing the wallet or even crash and automatically close the wallet.

Important: If you're using trunk, be sure to svn up both kdelibs and kdebase next time you recompile either. Otherwise your wallet might cease to work.

Good news for some

Apart from that, good news for all KDE Windows users: Starting with KDE 4.1.3, KWallet works fine on Windows. Thanks go to Patrick Spendrin for helping me fix this (and helping me compile when my VirtualBox decided to crash instead of compile) and to Fujisan for providing me with the screenshot to prove it works:

kwalletmanager on Windows

The outlook