Open Source

Thanks

The free open source initiative is a wonder.

I use so much software written by so many people. I tried to list projects and thank individuals, but the list is too long, and I am not sure that I am able to rate the projects by their importance. So if you ever contributed to the open source community, I thank you!

As a way of gratitude, I make an effort to contribute as much as I can, mainly to existing projects.

Alon Bar-Lev <alon.barlev@gmail.com>

Operating System

I recommend using Linux operating system, and specifically Gentoo distribution. I believe that Gentoo distribution is currently the only one that is compatible with the open source philosophy,

I retired from being Gentoo developer.

Open Source Projects

PKCS#11 in Open Source

Hardware cryptography (Smartcards) support is missing in open source community, mainly because there is no consensual standard regarding how to access these hardwares.

RSA Security published PKCS#11 standard, which addresses exactly this issue. However only few open source projects implemented PKCS#11 support.

The lack of hardware cryptography support is mainly a result of a conceptual dispute between Muscle, OpenSC, GnuPG and OpenSSL projects. Each believes that it is the most appropriate standard. The result is known to everyone - No proper hardware cryptography support is available in open source.

Muscle and OpenSC provide PKCS#11 provider, although not the mainline interface, can be used in standard environments.

My mission is to integrate PKCS#11 support in as many major open source projects as I can.

A list of project I cooperate with:

Other activity

Partial list:

PKCS#11 Utilities

Some utilities available at here.

Generic Utilities

Some utilities available at here.