tcpconns / News: Recent posts

Almost final release of the rewritten tcpconns library.

Small but certainly no insignificant optimizations in this second beta. Now TCPServer is even more efficient.

Welcome to the latest beta version of the tcpconns library. Enjoy this new release! It will save you time and effort in writing client server solutions. I believe it is more stable and easier to implement than the older versions of tcpconns. Besides, now you can use the 1.2 version of TLS (included with java 7). Source and binaries are profiled for java 5, so they should work on java 5, java 6, and java 7.... read more

Minor improvements. Added ability to generate 16384 bit RSA keypairs (4096 bits RSA = 128 bits symmetric aequivalent, 16384 bits RSA = 256 bits symmetric aequivalent). Note that it takes an awful lot of time to generate these kind of keysizes.

rewrote X.509/OpenPGP verification routines so that now they are more efficient

rewrote X.509/OpenPGP verification routines so that now they are more efficient

Updated the bouncycastle.org jars to version 1.44

This release of tcpconns brings an updated Keystore Manager application. You can open and save different kinds of keystore formats (including pkcs#12 (both old and new type), jks, bks, uber, jceks, and OpenSSL's .pem formatted keystores), and inspect and modify its contents. The CertAuth project has been removed since now the Keystore Manager application provides CA functionality, including the generation and approval of certification requests. Supports the creation and verification of OpenPGP signatures with X.509 keypairs. You will love this release! Upgrading is highly recommended.

The most important new functionality exposed by this release of the TCPConns package is a graphical KeyStore Manager, that allows you to open all kinds of keystores, manipulate the key entries in them, and then store them to disk, again in the format you like. The supported formats include PKCS#12 (.pfx/.p12), JKS, BKS, JCEKS, UBER, and of course OpenSSL's PEM format. I really like it!...no, I love it.

This new internal build offers advantages over the latest beta and significant advantages over the latest stable release, it is recommended that you upgrade. The latest stable release of TCPConns (dated 20090322) is hereby marked DEPRECATED.

Important update. Major changes to FTPServer. I'm getting there! TCPConns now includes an XML-FileStore component.

Small code rewrites, some reordering, added a method getJarName to the Utils class. Cross platform tested FTPServer locally against the latest FileZilla releases between/on Ubuntu Desktop 9.04/EXT4/SunJDK6, PCBSD7.1 (FreeBSD7.2PRE)/UFS2/SunJDK6, and Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium/NTFS/SunJDK6. Formal analysis of RFCs, a FTPServer GUI, and a corresponding FTPClient will all follow at a later date. For now you are encouraged to stress test FTPServer on all platforms that support version 1.5/5 or 1.6/6 of the java runtime environment (JRE) or java development kit (JDK); don’t forget to install the unlimited strength policy files if you wish to use the implicit TLS feature of FTPServer.

Thorough rewrite of the FTPServer project. FTPServer now supports implicit TLS. FTPServer now also works fine on Windows. Tested on Ubuntu Desktop Edition/EXT4/SunJDK6, PCBSD7.1(FreeBSD7.2PRE)/USF2/SunJDK6, and Windows Vista Home Premium SP1/NTFS/SunJDK6. Tested against FileZilla client.

FTPServer now has usermanagement. In the userdirectory of the current user that starts the ftpserver, a folder ".tcpconns" is created and in that folder another folder is placed named "ftpserver". In the "{userdir}/.tcpconns/ftpserver"-folder there is a file named "ftpserver.conf" (start and stop the server and then you can edit the userlist).

Various ftpserver improvements. Some minor changes to the tcpconns core package.

small bug fix (do GetCanonicalPath!)

Added FTPServer (still experimental and not complete!!). Upgraded to bouncycastle 1.43.

various improvements; N.B. work in progress

This is an alpha release of the next release (NR) of tcpconns.

For reasons of clarity/legibility/comprehensibility, I've decided to place the tcpconns classes in different subpackages.

client

-TTCPConnection

server

-TServerSideProtocol

-TTCPServer

tls

-TTLSHelper

-TTLSProvider

bouncyhelper

-KeyPairLoaderPEM

-PEM2PFX

-PFX2PEM

-TPasswordFinder

-TTLSPEMHelper

certutils

-CertGenerator

-RSAKeyPairGenerator

-RootCACertGenerator... read more

upgraded to bouncycastle 1.42 jar

maintenance release

Conversion between different kinds of certificate formats is now easy. Use the GUI CertConvert program to convert .pem to .pfx and vice versa and to extract .cer/.der encoded certificates from .pem and .pfx. The certificates generated by CertAuth now are also usable in e.g. the Apache Webserver (XAMPP) etc.

This releases fixes several small bugs. Developer's manual was slightly updated. New functionality in CertAuth: certs that are generated can now be stored in unencrypted state to disk. Reordered the distribution .zip.

added two classes that will enable the developer to convert between cert&&key files (.pfx <--> .pem). Use is quite straightforward.