Privacy and passwords

[David Lee Lambert]

On Wednesday 05 March 2008 08:05, Ian Lewis wrote:
> [...], but this particular feature is implemented elsewhere (with perhaps
> varying levels of security) and has been requested and asked about a number
> of times. I am not clamoring for it either but I think it's a feature that
> would make gnucash more popular. That's not to say it should be implemented
> without going all the way and implementing proper (read secure) encryption
> (if practically possible given where development of gnucash's backend is
> going).

I probably wouldn't use it if such a feature existed,  because I would also be 
worried about forgetting the password and thus losing all access to my 
historical accounting data; but such two-factor authentication 
(OS+application) is common in business systems. 

That said,  it should be easy to implement for the XML file. Right now,  the 
GNUcash file is compressed XML with a "gnc-v2" root element.  Someone could 
define a new "gnc-v2-encrypted" element with "algorithm" and "salt" 
attributes, and where the child text is the base64 encoding of the encrypted 
form of the compressed form of the unencrypted data.  The default algorithm 
could be AES-128 or 3DES, and the actual encryption key would be a hash of 
the concatenation of the salt and the password provided by the user.

GNUcash would have to link against a crypto library, which would be a new 
dependency.

-- 
David Lee Lambert <as4109 at wayne.edu> or <lamber45 at msu.edu>
  or <davidl at lmert.com> or +1 586-873-8813
BS Computer Science MSU 2003
Website at http://www.lmert.com/people/davidl/
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