[guardian-dev] Sharing encrypted content with other apps

[Mark Murphy]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014, at 17:13, David Holl wrote:
> a) How feasible would it be to use "FUSE" to let an app appear as a whole
> file system to another app?

No clue, sorry.

> b) Another idea --- getting back to the clever pipe approach...  It would
> be cool if unix socket URI's are available, such as
> "unix:///tmp/data/blah.txt" or "socket:///tmp/data/blah.txt" or whatever
> the URI scheme is.

AFAIK, that's not available at the Java layer, and definitely would not
be recognized by arbitrary third-party apps.

> c) But in lieu of a file socket, could an app share a document with
> another
> app by creating it's own mini http server socket, but bound to localhost
> on
> some randomized (OS-assigned) port?  Then the app could hand over a URI
> such as http://localhost:23901/blah.txt

This tends to wind up with the browser trying to handle all requests,
though there may be ways to craft the Intent you use to pass the Uri to
the third party to minimize this. However, you then lose all Android
security (e.g., FLAG_GRANT_URI_PERMISSIONS) and have to cook up your own
means to prevent arbitrary apps from accessing your content. That's not
out of the question -- SL4A had to do that for allowing Python, Perl,
and PHP interpreters to access their JSON Web service for exposti

Ironically, I was just discussing all of this on my office hours chats,
and I really need to pound harder on solving the rewindable-stream
issue...

-- 
Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)
http://commonsware.com | http://github.com/commonsguy
http://commonsware.com/blog | http://twitter.com/commonsguy

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