The next version 1.8.3.1123 of PixInsight, which we'll release tomorrow, comes with important new features to improve generation and management of PixInsight projects.
Sealed ProjectsSealing is a basic, unobtrusive mechanism to protect data integrity using highly secure cryptographic techniques (
AES256 encryption with random padding in the current versions of PixInsight). When you write a sealed project, PixInsight computes a
SHA1 checksum for the .xosm project file and stores it encrypted in a special .seal data file (on the .data project folder). When the project is loaded, PixInsight will decrypt the .seal file to verify that the project file has not been modified since it was generated. When you load a sealed project without warnings, you can be sure that no one or nothing has tampered with your data. Note that sealed projects force generation of SHA1 checksums for all project data files, which are stored as XML attributes in the .xosm file. This double hashing effectively prevents any changes for the whole project contents.
Starting from version 1.8.3.1123, project sealing is enabled by default (it can be disabled as an option, but this is strongly discouraged). However, when you load a project generated with previous versions, PixInsight detects no seal file in the project and issues a warning as shown below.
Simply click the OK button to load the project, and regenerate it on disk with the new version (with the sealing option enabled) to include a project seal file.
When a sealed project is loaded successfully, a note is written to the console to let you know that the integrity of your data has been verified:
When a sealed project is loaded and the seal verification fails, PixInsight informs you with an error message similar to this:
New Load Empty Project CommandIn the new version we have a
Load Empty Project item in the FILE main menu:
This option closes all images, icons, text files and tool windows, and resets the whole PixInsight platform to a default state. It is useful to start a new project from scratch without having to exit the PixInsight Core application.
Improved Project RobustnessAn important amount of code involved in project input/output tasks has been rewritten to achieve a much higher robustness. Projects are now highly error-tolerant, and can load virtually all of the data available in a project affected by XML errors, missing tools and interfaces, damaged images, ill-behaved processes, etc. The following screenshot shows an example where a missing process was preventing a project from loading some images in previous versions of PixInsight:
In Preparation: Signed ProjectsAn upcoming version of the PixInsight Core application (
before Christmas due January 2015) will include an additional project security feature: Signed projects with X.509 certificates and RSA encryption. Digital signatures will project both data integrity and authentication.
