Exploring the extension of thunderbird to support OTRmail

• Main Author: Tu, Cheng Hung.
• Other Authors: Woo Wing Keong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Data::Data encryption
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16894
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Electronic mail, often known as email, is the most popular internet activity. As massive information exchanges through email, and network security awareness increases, computer users are seeking ways to protect their privacy. Secured email is the most common solution being used to achieve such goal. Most of the secured email solutions are implementing protocols such as PGP or S/MIME, which were built on public key management. The difficulty in making general users to understand such mechanism results in usability problem in public key management. Hence, OTRmail is being introduced to solve such problem. OTRmail is built on the password mechanism which is being widely used in security system. This increases the acceptance of such system to general public. In order to promote OTRmail system, an extension is developed to allow one of the most popular email client, Mozilla Thunderbird, to support OTRmail system. In this project, it will introduce the basic knowledge to develop Thunderbird extension as well as the programming languages required. Thunderbird extension uses XUL to design user interface, JavaScript to develop controller and XPCOM to create and modify core system library. The development process is being discussed in great detail, especially the creation of XPCOM component. The reason is that in order to allow Thunderbird to support OTRmail, it is necessary to modify some of the system functionality which requires modification and creation of XPCOM component. A mock OTRmail security engine is developed at the end of the project. It includes basic user interface and modified features in Thunderbird to support OTRmail. This report also serves as a developer guide to assist developer in creating Thunderbird extension.