BPG: An OpenPGP Privacy Toolkit for NetBSD

What is it?

The BPG project aims to build a BSD-licensed framework to allow data authentication and encryption using the OpenPGP standard.

This project, mentored by NetBSD, was developed for Google's Summer of Code 2005.

For a probably more mature BSD-licensed implementation of OpenPGP, you can take a look at OpenPGP SDK.

Goals

The main goal of the BPG project is to produce a modular BSD-licensed OpenPGP toolkit, allowing ubiquitous usage of OpenPGP features.

The toolkit is divided into three layers:

• A set of core libraries, written in C, implementing the OpenPGP capabilities.
• Scripting wrappers, that allow multi-language access to the core libraries.
• Orthogonal, comprehensive and scriptable command-line programs built over the core libraries. This applications would be a suitable replacement for GnuPG or PGP.

Status

These are the already implemented features:

• Complete architecture of the OpenPGP library bpg.
• Signing and verification support, both for integrated and detached signatures. Key extraction is done transparently using GnuPG.
• Scriptable command line program.
• Ruby language access to the library.
• DSA signatures support.
• Man pages for command line program and libraries.
• Automated building and testing framework.

BPG is not under active development. Check the TODO file for a list of tasks to complete before the next stable version. Any help with it is very welcome.

For a probably more mature BSD-licensed implementation of OpenPGP, you can take a look at OpenPGP SDK.

Downloads

To download the Summer of Code version of BPG, go to the Sourceforge NetBSD-SoC downloads page.

You can also get the current unstable version under development in the CVS. Read the CVS instructions at Sourceforge for help. Don't forget to use the -P option to prune empty directories.

Documentation

All the documents and man pages generated in the project is available in the /doc directory of the CVS repository.

Main documents:

• Project description: presentation of the BPG project.
• Use cases: different scenarios we want the application to cover.
• Architecture: contains the design of the system, with the internals of each module and how they work together.
• Scripting support: description of the BPG scripting wrappers.
• Key management document: how does BPG manages the creation, storage, use and trust model of keys.
• Security document: security issues involved in BPG.

Reference material:

• RFC 2440: OpenPGP Message Format.
• GnuPG: the GNU Privacy Guard.
• PGP: Pretty Good Privacy.
• OpenPGP SDK: "The OpenPGP SDK project provides an open source library, written in C, which implements the OpenPGP specification".

Acknowledgements

The BPG project members would like to thank Google for sponsoring this project under their first Summer of Code program, and thank the NetBSD Foundation for providing mentors for it.

This project is generously hosted by Sourceforge.

Manuel Freire <droggo@gmail.com> $Id: index.html,v 1.19 2007/11/18 11:44:01 droggo Exp $