GSoC 2017 - WebUI integration

This post is about my current plans on how to implement the web ui part of PGP enabled Mailman. It strives to integrate into the Mailman Suite and use its features to the maximum possible degree.

General idea: Refactor general stuff to django-mailman3, to allow apps to hook up together in Mailman Suite easily, and then use that to hook up django-pgpmailman.

Features#

Show PGP enabled public lists, with their key fingerprints, with the option to download their public keys, also show some of their configuration (so that subscribers can see that for example if they send a cleartext message to a list that requires encrypted messages, it will be bounced).

Enable list owner to configure the PGP related per-list configuration options.

Enable list owner to set/see the list key (private part). This is quite questionable and will have a site-level option to be turned off (the REST API will then not serve the list private key).

The same level of user key management as the key command allows, with similar steps during key change/revocation.

Implementation#

Another django app is installed in the same project as Postorius + HyperKitty, django-pgpmailman. This app provides a list of PGP enabled mailing lists and their PGP related management in a similar way Postorius does, also user key management.

There are few places where Postorius refers to HyperKitty and vice versa, for adding the appropriate links/icons to the navbar as well as for the user menu entries. These references will be refactored to some mechanism in django-mailman3, which will allow any installed django app to add it’s entry to the navbar or the user menu. This will allow django-pgpmailman to hook up rather easily, without any direct references to it from Postorius/HyperKitty/django-mailman3.

Archiving#

The archiving web UI is a tougher nut to crack. I either have to develop a custom PGP mail archive frontend and integrate it similar to the PGP list management app, or integrate with HyperKitty transparently, so that archives are received encrypted, stored encrypted, and yet served to subscribers in clear. Developing a custom app is quite unrealistic and it would lack most HyperKitty functions.

However hooking up an encrypted message store to HyperKitty is also non-trivial, as HyperKitty is strongly tied with storing messages in it’s database and using a django Model to represent a message.

I currently have no realistic ideas, one that comes to mind, is to create a custom django database backend, that somehow stores everything encrypted, but thats a very unwieldy solution that likely won’t work well.

Other progress#

Fixed many little issues with the PGP plugin and PGPy. Got it to work quite nicely, below you can see a message received by a subscriber, by a PGP enabled discussion list, encrypted to his key, as shown by Thunderbird with the EnigMail plugin:

Also finally merged the finished key revoke command to mailman-pgp/master.