Jera Design : Solitaire

Solitaire for KJava home page

Solitaire for KJava is an implementation of the Solitaire cryptosystem for the Palm KJava VM. Solitaire is a cryptosystem designed by Bruce Schnier to provide high-quality cryptosystem where messages can be encoded and decoded manually. It uses a shuffled deck of cards for the message key. Soltaire appears as a crucial plot point in the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephensen. Solitaire for KJava was winner of the "Most Visionary App" category in the KJava Hackathon contest held at the 1999 JavaOne Conference.

Source

In addition to being useful for encoding, decoding, and securely beaming small messages, Solitaire for KJava serves as an example of how to write a Palm application in Java. The source code to Solitaire for KJava is freely modifiable and redistributable under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Download Solitaire.zip (9kb)

Build Instructions

Short Version:

If you've already got Java and Ant installed, and you have "j2me_cldc" installed at "C:\", just "cd" to wherever you installed Solitaire, and type "ant". If all goes well, you'll be rewarded by a file called "SolitaireJB.prc", which you can install on your Palm and use (provided you've already got the KVM installed on your Palm).

Long Version:

(These instruction assume you already have a JDK installed, and your classpath and path set up to use it.)

• First, download and install Sun's Java 2 Micro Edition CLDC package. You'll need both "j2me_cldc-1_0_2-fcs-winunix.zip" and "j2me_cldc-1_0_2-fcs-kjava_overlay.zip". Because Sun screwed up the packaging, you'll need to follow the following instructions closely.
  • Unzip "j2me_cldc-1_0_2-fcs-winunix.zip" into wherever you usuall install source. I used "C:\" Note that archive contains one folder "j2me_cldc", which contains all the contents of the archive.
  • Unzip "j2me_cldc-1_0_2-fcs-kjava_overlay.zip" so that all of its files overlay the ones already in "j2me_cldc". Note: this archive doesn't have a root "j2me_cldc" folder, just the folders under it. To extract it properly, you'll need to set the target folder to wherever you extracted the other ZIP to. In my case, that means I extract this archive to "C:\j2me_cldc". This extract will overwrite a few files from the first ZIP.
• Install the Java VM on your Palm. The VM is located in your copy of the j2me_cldc tree at: j2me_cldc\bin\kjava\palm\KVM.prc. You'll also need to install KVMUtil.prc, located in the same directory.
• If you haven't got it already, you'll need to install the Ant build tool, available at: http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/
• Unzip Solitaire.zip.
• In the Solitaire directory, type:
  ant
  (If you installed the j2me_cldc directory someplace other than C:\, you'll need to tweak the values of the property definitions at the begining of build.xml to point to the right place.)
• Ant should run and produce a file SolitaireJB.prc, which you can then install on your Palm. If you installed the j2me_cldc directory someplace other than C:\, you'll need to tweak the values of the property definitions at the begining of build.xml to point to your file.
• To run, tap the SolitaireJB icon in the Palm's application list.

Credits:

The Palm-specific portions of Solitaire for KJava were writen by John Brewer during the 1999 JavaOne Conference. The Java implementation of the Solitaire cipher algorithm is Jeff Gold's, slightly modified by John Brewer to run under KJava for PalmOS. The original source code for desktop Java, along with more information about the Solitaire cryptosystem can be found at:

http://www.counterpane.com/solitaire.html

Feedback:

Please send feedback to solitaire@jera.com.