[Authentication] Short introduction

[Stef Walter]

Stef Walter here, maintainer of gnome-keyring.

Props to Michael for bringing us all together and getting us going :)

> My main rationale for taking part in this undergoing is providing a central 
> storage for as much of the free desktop as possible without having to run 
> several concurrent daemons. While GNOME has their keyring system, some non 
> desktop-affiliated applications currently use their own password store and I 
> hope that by creating a shared spec we can convince (some of) them to migrate 
> as well.

An important thing to note from the outset is that this effort is
*completely* orthogonal to: crypto libraries, certificates, keys, smart
cards, NSS, OpenSSL, GnuTLS, holy wars, PKCS#11, authorities, 'trust',
TPM, and so many other things.

Although implementations of this API might use one or more of the above
technologies/libraries in their implementation, this is unrelated to the
specification of this secrets API.

This secrets API is about applications having a way to store secrets
(ie: passwords) in a secure and simple manner, and then retrieve them
again later.

All the best,

Stef