From: pstemari@fsp.fsp.com (Paul Ste. Marie)
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 94 20:54:41 PST
To: bshantz@spry.com
Subject: GUCAPI (Grand Unified Crypto API)
In-Reply-To: <9412062142.AA08621@homer.spry.com>
Message-ID: <9412070454.AA12355@fsp.fsp.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> I would be interested in seeing something like this implemented, but I 
> question whether it will be a hit as an industry standard.  Generic API's 
> really haven't gone over well for things in the past.  (Except the class 
> libraries for major C++ compilers.  MFC, OWL, etc.)
> The design has to be robust before you start coding.  

Something like this should be fairly reasonable to implement in C++.
The basic concept would be to have a single public abstract class with
a static method that takes a protocol name and returns a pointer to an
encryption engine object that implements that protocol.  The actual
classes could either register themselves with the base class
statically at link time or dynamically via DLL's or equivalent and an
OS dependent config utility.

The biggest question to my mind is how to handle key management and
whether the engines should require blocks of an appropriate size (eg
encrypt(size_t blksize, const char *inbuf, char *outbuf)) or act as
pumps with user-specified data sources and sinks (eg encrypt(istream&
input, ostream& output)).

	Paul