Kleopatra 2.0 - The Universal Certificate Manager and Crypto GUI

Speaker: Marc Mutz

The GnuPG Cryptographic Suite is the most widely distributed and most widely used solution for end-to-end encryption via OpenPGP. From version 2.0 onwards, S/MIME (X.509, CMS) is being supported in addition.

All GnuPG components are text-terminal-based. Only for passphrase-entry are graphical dialogs being displayed optionally.

During the last few months, the KDE Certificate Manager Kleopatra has been transformed into a universal graphical interface to GnuPG (available in KDE 4.1 and Gpg4win 2.0).

"Universal" in three ways: First, Kleopatra is now available on both unixoid operating systems (including MacOS X), as well as on Windows. Kleopatra furthermore unifies management of both OpenPGP and X.509 certificates in a way unique amongst Free Software projects. Most importantly, though, Kleopatra is now a GUI Server for different, high-level, use cases.

This third feature implies the following: regardless of whether mail using Outlook or Kontact, file management using Explorer or Konqueror/Dolphin; the same dialogs and user settings are being used in all cases. Users can thus concentrate on learning just one interface instead of fighting with different variants of the same theme in different situations.

On the application developer side, adding cryptographic functionality is now easier than ever, with an API that is expressed in use cases such as Encrypt Email or Verify File instead of cryptographic primitives like hashes and ciphers.

The talk will describe the concepts and, roughly, the implementation of Kleopatra 2.0. The audience will also learn how to Kleopatra-enable their own applications. The talk will conclude with an outlook onto the next planned steps.