[Pythonmac-SIG] Package Manager idea, adding a URL scheme

[Bob Ippolito]

On Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, at 15:57 America/New_York, Glenn Andreas 
wrote:

>> On Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, at 15:30 America/New_York, amk at amk.ca wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 09:06:43PM +0200, Jack Jansen wrote:
>>>> We are going to need digital signatures at some point, so if we're
>>>> not going to have them in Python we have to warn users and provide
>>>> them with an out-of-band way to test packages.
>>>
>>> Can we use GnuPG?  It provides an interface for being run as a 
>>> subprocess
>>> and reporting results back in a form usable for programs.  Perhaps 
>>> it could
>>> just require that GnuPG is available (via Fink or some other 
>>> mechanism).
>>
>> I think it would be a lot easier on the users if we could just let 
>> them install a particular Python package that can do the signature 
>> verification.  Is there anything in OpenSSL that could be exploited 
>> for this purpose?
>
> According to http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/DSA_sign.html it sure 
> looks that way.
>
> Now if this is directly usable, that's another question...

PyOpenSSL documentation (probably does it):
http://pyopenssl.sourceforge.net/pyOpenSSL.txt
(3.1.3 - X509Req objects)
sign(pkey, digest)
           Sign the certificate, using the key pkey and the message 
digest
           algorithm identified by the string digest.
verify(pkey)
           Verify a certificate request using the public key pkey.


M2Crypto has an example implementation of S/MIME as a HOWTO on its page 
(sign, encrypt, decrypt, verify)!
http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps/m2/howto.smime.html

It looks like doing this w/ M2Crypto would likely be more 
straightforward, but it's probably possible in either.  It's 
*definitely* possible to verify a SSL certificate with either :)

-bob