Forums

by Hido Hasimbegovic >> Thu, 11 Jan 2001 22:07:47 GMT

Greetings Jade World


I'm fiddling with TcpIp classes and it occurred to me as a good idea to actually encrypt/decrypt some of stuff being sent around. What is the best way to go about this? I was thinking about writing something in Jade (BlowFish algorithm seems pretty ok), or use something external. TcpIp class does have encryptMethod, authenticationLibrary, cryptLibrary, decryptMethod, encryptMethod, genAuthChallenge properties & methods, but the Help file offers nothing more that a two-liner on each in the way of explanation. Your 2c worth will be greatly appreciated.



Regards from stinking hot Sydney


Hido

by Craig Shearer >> Fri, 12 Jan 2001 0:18:58 GMT

ah... another case of the help file being completely bloody useless!!! You have my sympathy!

Craig. (who's generally just as much in the dark when it comes to matters of network programming!)

by JADE Kid - Ray Hidayat >> Fri, 12 Jan 2001 0:25:43 GMT

I agree completely. Check my 'What does the DbFile class do?' thread to see what he is talking about.

--
Ray Hidayat
JADE Kid - 2000
www.jadekids.com

by Wilfred Verkley >> Thu, 1 Feb 2001 4:19:35 GMT

Typically when you want this sort of functionality, you don't only need encryption. You probably want authentication (the ability to ensure you are talking only to authorized people), and the ability to tamper-proof your communication as well.

The industry standard for this sort of stuff is SSL (secure sockets layer) which is a protocol that provides a secure way of communicating over TCP/IP connections. An easy way to implement this independently of Jade is to use a SSL Proxy. Your client connects normally to a local proxy, which then connects securely to another proxy elsewhere close to the destination using SSL, which then makes a normal connection to your server. The whole process is invisible to Jade, and you would write your code the same as you always would, except that your client connects to the proxy, not directly to the server. Also, because its not integrated with Jade, you might still have to use some other mechanism like a username/password for authenticating the client to Jade itself.

Jade provides some hooks for these things on the TCP/IP connection class, but it requires you to write your own encryption and authentication routines. As far as I know, none are supplied, and if this is genuinly sensitive information, i wouldnt recommend it anyway. I know that there are SSL hooks for the thin client though, so it must have been looked at.

Some free SSL proxies can be found at: http://www.delegate.org/delegate/ssl/ http://www.stunnel.org/download/binaries.html

Information on the open source version of SSL (OpenSSL) can be found at : http://www.openssl.org

Regards,

Wilfred.