Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes ("Re: [pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#840669: Bug#840669: Beware of leftover gpg-agent processes"): > On Sat 2016-10-15 11:21:29 -0400, Ian Jackson wrote: > > 1. gnupg1-compatible authorisation lifetime: > > I believe this is a deliberate change in semantics from the upstream > GnuPG project. In particular, authorization for the use of secret key > material is now the responsibility of the gpg-agent. This is an overall > win, because it means that no process ever gets access to the secret key > in memory *except* for the gpg-agent.
I think these properties about key material handling are good, but this is not the same question as the authorisation lifetime. You are conflating two separate things. > The gpg-agent is where these decisions are made. Actually, though, it just acts as an oracle, so it does not make any decisions. > If you want an agent that never caches any passphrase (and therefore has > a one-use-per-authorization), this is an easy thing to do by adjusting > max-cache-ttl in gpg-agent.conf. you can also set this dynamically with > gpgconf (see the --runtime option in gpgconf(1)). It sounds like this is very close to what I want for the authorisation lifetime qeustion (provided that it isn't racy). Why is this not the default for command line users without a session-provided agent ? > Thanks for your engagement on this issue, Ian. Thank you for being so tolerant of me being argumentative ! Regards, Ian. -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.