Qt Cryptographic Architecture
Taking a hint from the similarly-named Java Cryptography Architecture, QCA aims to provide a straightforward and cross-platform cryptographic API, using Qt datatypes and conventions. QCA separates the API from the implementation, using plugins known as Providers. The advantage of this model is to allow applications to avoid linking to or explicitly depending on any particular cryptographic library. This allows one to easily change or upgrade Provider implementations without even needing to recompile the application!
QCA should work everywhere Qt does, including Windows/Unix/MacOSX. This version of QCA is for Qt4, and requires no Qt3 compatibility code.
This library provides an easy API for the following features:
Functionality is supplied via plugins. This is useful for avoiding dependence on a particular crypto library and makes upgrading easier, as there is no need to recompile your application when adding or upgrading a crypto plugin. Also, by pushing crypto functionality into plugins, your application is free of legal issues, such as export regulation.
And of course, you get a very simple crypto API for Qt, where you can do things like:
The application simply includes <QtCrypto> and links to libqca, which provides the 'wrapper API' and plugin loader. Crypto functionality is determined during runtime, and plugins are loaded from the 'crypto' subfolder of the Qt library paths. There are additional examples available.
The latest version of the code is available from the KDE Subversion server (there is no formal release of the current version at this time). See http://developer.kde.org/source/anonsvn.html for general instructions. You do not need kdelibs or arts modules for QCA - just pull down kdesupport/qca. The plugins are in the same tree. Naturally you will need Qt properly set up and configured in order to build and use QCA.
The Subversion code can also be browsed via the web
A previous version of QCA (sometimes referred to as QCA1) which works with Qt3, is still available. You will need to get the main library (qca-1.0.tar.bz2) and one or more providers (qca-tls-1.0.tar.bz2 for the OpenSSL based provider, or qca-sasl-1.0.tar.bz2 for the SASL based provider). Note that development of QCA1 has basically stopped.
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