In previous posts, I mentioned that I forked Bouncy-GPG to create PGPainless, which will be my simple to use OX/OpenPGP API. I have some news regarding that, since I made a radical decision.

I’m not going to fork Bouncy-GPG anymore, but instead write my own OpenPGP library based on BouncyCastle. The new PGPainless will be more suitable for the OX use case. The main reason I did this, was because Bouncy-GPG followed a pattern, where the user would have to know, whether an incoming message was encrypted or signed or both. This pattern does not apply to OX very well, since you don’t know, what content an incoming message has. This was a deliberate decision made by the OX authors to circumvent certain attacks.

Ironically, another reason why I decided to write my own library are Bouncy-GPGs many JUnit tests. I tried to make some changes, which resulted in breaking tests all the time. This might of course be a bad sign, indicating that my changes are bad, but in my case I’m pretty sure, that the tests are just a little bit over oversensitive 🙂 For me it would be less work/more fun to create my own library, than trying to fix Bouncy-GPGs JUnit tests.

The new PGPainless is already capable of generating various OpenPGP keys, encrypting and signing data, as well as decrypting messages. I noticed, that using elliptic curve encryption keys, I was able to reduce the size of (short) messages by a factor of two. So recommending EC keys to implementors might be worth a thought. There is still a little bug in my code which causes signature verification to fail, but I’ll find it – and I’ll kill it.

Today I spent nearly 3 hours debugging a small bug in the decryption code. It turns out, that this code works like I intended,

PGPObjectFactory objectFactory = new PGPObjectFactory(encryptedBytes, fingerprintCalculator);

Object o = objectFactory.nextObject();

while this code does not:

PGPObjectFactory objectFactory = new PGPObjectFactory(encryptedBytes, fingerprintCalculator);

Object o = objectFactory.iterator().next();

The difference is subtle, but apparently deadly.

You can find the new PGPainless on my Gitea instance 🙂