signTextJS plus

window.crypto.signText support and enhancements

Why signTextJS plus?

window.crypto.signText is a digital signature technology that has been available since 1998. It is used by government and banking sites. It can be used to participate in plebiscites.

The window.crypto interfaces were removed from Firefox 35 and later releases. An add-on was developed as a stop-gap measure for users; that add-on is deprecated and does not work since Firefox 57.

signTextJS plus takes over this technology. It restores automatic signatures and filtering by certificate authority, and provides these enhancements:

• An asynchronous mode.
• Filtering by non-repudiation.
• SHA-256 support.

How-to

This is still work in progress. The Firefox extension depends on a native back end which needs deployment. You can download the installer at the releases page. The add-on works on Linux and Windows 64, and it is expected to work on macOS too.

For system-wide availability:

• On Linux, run the installer as root.
• On Windows, the installer will ask you.
• On macOS, do the usual DMG installation.

For per-user availability:

• On Linux, run the installer as the user.
• On Windows, the installer will ask you.
• On macOS, open the DMG and deploy manually.

To develop the Firefox extension, try a temporary installation. Alternatively, install the WebExtensions SDK following the directions from Mozilla. Then, after checking out this repository, change to directory webextension and execute web-ext run to run Firefox with the extension or web-ext build to package the extension. After the extension and the native back end have been installed, scripts that call window.crypto.signText should "just work".

If there is no installer for your architecture, you can compile the application and set up the environment. The files in directory travis have the steps to install dependencies, compile the native back end, run a test, and build the installer.

You may install the latest published extension from Mozilla. Firefox versions prior to 57 should stick with version 0.8.7; its source code is available at branch add-on-sdk.

Documentation

Project documentation is available under directory doc. You might be interested in Showoctocats if you want to render these pages as XHTML directly.

Test page

You may test the add-on at the HTML test page. Again, you might be interested in Showoctocats if you want to render this page as HTML directly.

Corresponding source

You may find the corresponding source at the add-on home page.

TODO

See issues.