Re: Wherein I argue for the inclusion of libnettle in Emacs 24.5

[Daiki Ueno]

Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:

> Please see my objection to loose coupling of encryption primitives in
> particular.

Didn't I post a link to the idea of this loose coupling?  It is mainly
for security reasons.  For example, there's usually a limit of secure
memory and it makes sense to do all the secret key operation in a
minimal core (gpg-agent) to utilize it.

I don't think you can provide the same level of security using
encryption primitives within Emacs.

> Right.  Shelling out to an external binary every time you want to verify
> a package's signature or want to encrypt/decrypt/sign data makes perfect
> sense.

At least it works at acceptable performance now.

> Blindly entering your passphrase in an anonymous popup that says it's
> from the GnuPG agent is how things are done.

This could be fixed.  Sounds definitely easier than importing plenty of
crypto primitives from a C library.

> Trusting loosely coupled components is standard industry practice.

See above.

> Forcing users to do all of that, or "no encryption for you" is for their
> own good, on every platform where Emacs runs, from Android to W32 to Mac
> OS X to many flavors of Unix.  Users are just too stupid to decide these
> things on their own.

I don't get it.  Are there any platforms where Emacs work, while GPG
does not?

> Is that how experts with a crypto/security background do it?  I'm
> understanding now.

Better than letting you write encryption code for me.

Case study (sorry Jose):
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-recutils/2012-04/msg00001.html

I can easily imagine you will make similar (or more serious) mistakes
here and there, once crypto primitives are available.
-- 
Daiki Ueno