A forum for discussing the optimal selection of packages for inclusion in a Starkit archive to form the core set of functionality available for all weedesk applications.

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1-17-2004 MDD - I'll kick things off by proposing a simple, but solid, cryptographic toolkit. Since weedesk will most often be used as a bring-it-with-you portable computing environment, most likely residing on some sort of flash memory device, security of data will be of paramount importance. I'd suggest a simple set of primitives to support symmetric (Blowfish, perhaps) and asymmetric (RSA, maybe) encryption, SSL (TLS?), and Base64-encoding, as well as a good one-way hash (sha1 ?). Key management and other such niceties can then be scripted at the Tcl level. Even though things like base64 and sha1 can be, and have been, made with pure Tcl, for platform-level use we should keep the primitives binary to allow acceptable performance for finely-grained integration of cryptography throughout the environment. Add in the existing zlib tools, and it would be pretty easy to do a roll-your-own PGP-like crypto toolkit that all weeApps could call upon.

Larry Smith 12/31/04: I figure at this point weeapps would also be available from the web - log into your weeWeb server at home and get access to your entire home environment running in the plugin. In any event, crypto and signing will be critical - this is all executable content. Let's not give Linux all the headaches Windows has. :(

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