Encrypting information is key to the effective use of a distributed system. For a variety of reasons, stream-based encryption is rarely helpful for ensuring the security of data in a distributed system. What is important is for the endpoints (consumers/producers) of data in a distributed system encrypt the data they care about.

To achieve this in the browser, we must have a way of performing standard cryptographic techniques on data. Most of the existing cryptographic support in browsers is built around the Public Key Infrastructure, which basically boils down to “trust the corps that have root certificates”. Furthermore, it is entirely concerned with stream based encryption, and doesn’t help content-encryption.

• JavaScrypt – an implementation of AES in javascript.
• Enigform and FireGPG provide a firefox exension that allows GPG-based encryption of http content, as well as digital signatures, etc. This is essentially the feature requirement we’re looking for, but Firefox/Moz only.