Diaspora: end-to-end encryption with Mailvelope?

[mdik]

Hi,

I'm considering applying for this round of Prototypefund with the project of making Mailvelope compatible with Diaspora and Mastodon.

Mailvelope is conceived as a browser plugin for pgp encryption of emails, but it is very easily applicable to any text input on websites.

It already works out of the box with direct messages, but my goal would be to make it work with all textareas on Diaspora.

The first step would be to either change the HTML in Diaspora or the recognition algorithm in Mailvelope to make Mailvelope recognize these textarea elements as a text to be potentially encrypted.

A second and third step would be to implement support for the Mailvelope-API in Diaspora, and setting up automatic key management (this could be done with a dedicated key server, or via Diaspora federation itself).

My intention is to keep the complexity as low as possible, and if in doubt only go as far as to make it possible at all to encrypt messages with Mailvelope, but the farther the better :-D

Would that be something others would be supportive of?

Thank you for considering and sincerely,

Malte

[spixi]

@mdik, This text sounds so familiar to me. Have you just copied it from me or do I have a déjà vu? Either way, I totally support your suggestion.

[mdik]

Sorry, no. I searched for "Mailvelope" in the issues but couldn't find any prior.

Thank you for your support, though!

(And I copy-pasted a little bit, but from myself for cross-posting to Mastodon: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/4807)

[spixi]

Well, I posted this on Discourse here:

https://discourse.diasporafoundation.org/t/add-mailvelope-support/691

[mdik]

Ah, cool! Encouraging to see that someone else had the same idea, a bit discouraging to read the answer, and answers, but I think as long as we keep as much of the moving parts out of Diaspora as possible we should be fine?

[spixi]

I think so. The only thing we need is that the input boxes can be detected by Mailvelope. Key management can be handled outside of diaspora*. I am using Seahorse as a Gnome Keyring client, which works like a charm, because Firefox and thus Mailvelope also support Gnome Keyring.