PGP Clean Room: GSoC Mentors Wanted
I am a prospective GSoC student and I would be very interested in working on the PGP Clean Room project for Debian this summer. Unfortunately the current confirmed mentor, Daniel Pocock, is involved in the admin team and possibly in multiple other GSoC projects as well. So I am looking for another mentor who would be willing to help me on this project.
The Problems of PGP
PGP is essential to Debian and many other free software projects. It secures almost everything these projects distribute on the Internet. But for new users it can be difficult to set up. It typically requires complex command line interactions that the user doesn’t really understand, leading to much confusion and silly mistakes. Best practice is to generate the keys offline and store them on a set of separate storage devices, but there isn’t currently a tool to handle this well at all. I eventually got TAILS to serve this purpose but it was more difficult than it should have been.
What the PGP Clean Room will do
The PGP Clean room will walk new users through setting up a set of USB flash drives or sd cards as a raid disk, generating new PGP keys, storing them there, and then exporting subkeys either on a separate USB stick or a security key like a Yubikey. I’d also like to add the ability to do things like revoke keys or extend expiration dates for them through the application. Additionally, I would like to add an import feature for new keys and support for X.509 key management. My current plan is to write a python-newt application for this and use GPGME’s python bindings to generate the keys.
My Qualifications
I am currently a package maintainer for a couple packages in Debian. I’m a freshman intending to major in Computer Science at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, USA. I’ve taken a few college-level CS classes, but as can been seen from my Github profile, I’m mostly self-taught.
I’ve started working on this a little bit and published it on Debian’s Gitlab.