Privacy/Features/mozCipherAddressbook

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Feature	Status	ETA	Owner
mozCipherAddressbookAPI	Design and Implementation exists in an addon: DOMCrypt. (Needs porting)	2011-05-09	David Dahl

Summary

A simple API for exchanging public keys via web page metatags as an enhancement to the DOMCryptAPI (mozCipher), see: Privacy/Features/DOMCryptAPI

Team

• Feature Manager: David Dahl
• Lead Developer: David Dahl
• Product Manager: Dietrich Alaya
• QA: Juan Beccera
• UX: Limi
• Accessibility:
• Security: Sid Stamm
• Privacy: Sid Stamm

Release Requirements

Parsing the DOM on idle to discover "addressbook-entry" meta tags would make the most sense - there is a little bit of research to do here on perf.

Next Steps & Open Issues

Port the existing synchronous API over to an asynchronous API

Related Bugs & Dependencies

Not sure what component under Firefox to file the bug under yet

Risks

None on the radar at this point. Will update.

Use Cases

DOMCrypt (see Privacy/Features/DOMCryptAPI is a public key crypto API, which is useful as-is, but to enhance the user experience, a simple method to collect and store your contact's public keys would make DOMCrypt a bit more powerful. This simple API adds to window.mozCipher (which is provided by DOMCrypt):

window.mozCipher.getAddressbook();

It also adds a browser-side notificationbar that is displayed when a "addressbook-entry" meta tag is encountered. This notificationbar asks the user to save or ignore the "contact entry". This is a very simple way for endusers to exchange public keys and is presented in a language that is easily understood. Users need each other's addressbook entry to exchange private message data. This simplifies the nomenclature greatly, which will help bring more user control and privacy to users who care to exchange data on the web in a more secure manner.

Designs

The existing implementation is here: [1]

A demo can be found here: [2]

Test Plans

TBD

Goals

As simple as possible mechanism for web users to discover and save public keys as a helper for the DOMCryptAPI

Non-Goals

Any kind of key management UI or toolkit

Legend

	Healthy: feature is progressing as expected.
ETA	2011-08-01