Week 4

"Redirection" was implemented and the end-to-end (e2e) google crypto library in javascript was imported this week.

The quotation make in "Redirection" indicates that it is in fact not real redirection. It works as follows. Once the extension detects a gnocchi file to be received from the server, it opens a new tab in the browser, displays the content (encrypted message for now, since I don't have time to work more on the crypto part), and closes the original tab. I had tried to realize the real redirection, but there seemed to be a bug in chrome. When I tried to access a gnocchi file from a loaded tab, a tab loaded with contents from other links, it got redirected to "about:blank", although the extension worked well in the case of a blank tab, or a newly-opened tab. Please see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=300685 for more information related to this issue. (Update before Friday night: I have just fixed the issue. It is now real redirection to the file content, instead of about:blank)

I also included the end-to-end (e2e) google crypto library in the project. It is well-known that there is few reliable crypto library implemented in javascript. I took a look at crypto-js (a nice one with friendly interface, also easy to import), and SJCL (started by people at Stanford University). However, due to the inactivity of both libraries, I selected e2e at last. Though newly developed, e2e is maintained and updated by the developers at Google. Besides, it is relatively easy to import e2e using Google's Closure Library. Finally, Google knows chrome best, so e2e is expected to be compatible with chrome.

I will focus on the crypto part of the project next week, in order to have decryption work. Also, if I have time, I am going to do more research on file IO in javascript, too. I slow down my research on that because we are mainly handling text message and html document at this moment, and file IO will be an extra feature in the future, rather than the goal at present. Furthermore, file IO is very very tricky in javascript...