|
Sorry for splitting Peter and Philihp into two threads.
I have probably put my gpg environment/program in a state it
cannot come out of. I want to do what cowards do. I want to
uninstall gpg and start all over again, escaping from the mess I
put my self into somehow. With the advice you gave me I should do
better next the time, and hopefully stay out of trouble.
I have not given anybody any of the IDs yet. And besides, the
intended application is non interactive and also does not
communicate anything. It hides everything and itself from ever
body and ever thing, let alone the keys (or at least that is the
intention if a manage to keep me out of trouble. I am a ASIC
hardware guy venturing to do what I should not; obviously.)
How do I ensure I uninstall without leaving any history or state
that could affect a new install please? Sorry for the head ache I
am giving you. If I manage to make money and not go bankrupt I
will remember my friends.
On 7/12/2020 11:01 AM, Ayoub Misherghi
wrote:
Thanks. This exposes to me how little I know and it will take me
time to absorb it. None of this information is in anything I read.
Nothing comes close. I will not come to grips with it with the
kind of reading material I have. Can you please suggest some good
tutorial and reference material preferably free (probably mutually
exclusive requirements) that will bring me up to your level or
close to it please.
The material I come across is just like silly preschool stuff with
1/4 truth which keeps you ill informed and miss informed and
throws you off track. They over simplify and drain education out
of you making you zombie.
Thanks,
Ayoub
On 7/12/2020 9:15 AM, Peter Lebbing wrote:
On 12/07/2020 17:45, Ayoub Misherghi
wrote:
Sorry for going off list and messing
everybody up. Now I disserve
punishment.
Heh :-). It's just that if I reply off-list, it only helps you,
but if
it is on-list, other people can find it in a search engine when
they're
facing something similar.
On 11/07/2020 21:07, Ayoub Misherghi wrote:
My current intended usage is in
non-interactive mode, completely.
I can remove them from the gpg.conf but I would have to issue
them
every time. My understanding is that non-interactive mode
requires
those commands.
Well, in that case, you should supply --no-batch when you're
using it
interactively; I'll show why further down.
My personal choice would be to have my scripts and programs
supply the
--batch on invocation rather than put it in the config file,
because you
only need to write that command invocation in the script once
(as you're
writing the script), whereas you'll be writing the --no-batch
every time
you /do/ use it from an interactive shell.
I selected "expert" mode because I am
using ED2599 incrpytion that is
available only in this mode (I know, I am newbie)
You only need the --expert on commands creating or adding keys
for that.
Once you have the key, you no longer need --expert to just use
it.
All the config lines I showed are in my
user config.
A few days ago, my set up, which is still in development
phase,
worked until my short lived gpg keys expired. I fell in deep
***** when
I created new keys. It all worked, with the passphrase-file
option and
without, before I fell. Can you pull this dumb newbie out?
I think the combination that worked might have been
--8<---------------cut
here---------------start------------->8---
pinentry-mode loopback
passphrase-file /home/ayoub/.gnupg/output.png
--8<---------------cut
here---------------end--------------->8---
but once you commented out the passphrase-file entry, GnuPG had
no way
to get the passphrase. Normally you should use the pinentry (so
comment
out the pinentry-mode line as well), but you force it to use the
loopback pinentry-mode. gpg _could_ ask for your passphrase that
way.
But, you also specify --batch. --batch tells GnuPG that the
human is
currently unavailable and it needn't bother trying to interact
with it.
So it has no way to get the passphrase and gives up.
It will ask you for the passphrase when you comment out --batch,
but I
recommend also commenting out the --pinentry-mode line so it'll
just
launch a pinentry like it wants to do.
Now about this configuration:
--8<---------------cut
here---------------start------------->8---
pinentry-mode loopback
passphrase-file /home/ayoub/.gnupg/output.png
--8<---------------cut
here---------------end--------------->8---
If this file is stored with the same access conditions as
~/.gnupg/private-keys-v1.d/, it serves no good purpose. You
should then
just use a key without a passphrase. With a key without a
passphrase, an
attacker would just need the file
~/.gnupg/private-keys-v1.d/[...].key
and they're good to go. With your passphrase-file, they need two
files:
~/.gnupg/private-keys-v1.d/[...].key
~/.gnupg/output.png
and once again they're good to go, they have your private key.
Why would
it be more difficult to get a hold of two files rather than one?
Just
drop the passphrase, and all your problems magically disappear
:-).
But given its name, I suppose output.png is generated by some
unlocking
process. Suppose you did it like this before:
$ my-unlocker >~/.gnupg/output.png
You can actually unlock keys the way GnuPG intends to do that
with:
$ my-unlocker | /usr/lib/gnupg/gpg-preset-passphrase --preset
<keygrip>
You can find the keygrip for your keys with:
$ gpg --with-keygrip --list-secret-keys
You do need it for every subkey you want to use like this
separately,
and also, it does not verify whether the passphrase was correct.
Also,
put
allow-preset-passphrase
max-cache-ttl <seconds>
in ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf
and issue
$ gpgconf --kill gpg-agent
to reload. <seconds> is how long you want the passphrase
to stay
available after gpg-preset-passphrase, and it defaults to a mere
2
hours. You could set it to 4294967295 to specify a lifetime of
136
years, i.e., infinitely for all practical purposes.
Watch out that my-unlocker doesn't leak the passphrase in any
way. I
thought it was unhelfpul that you can't use the pinentry with
gpg-preset-passphrase and I proposed a hack more than two years
ago:
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2018-February/059917.html
It's pretty hacky, but it does seem to work.
You could actually just unlock your key by using it once when
you start
up your system, and then use the caching feature to keep it
available
for non-interactive use for the rest of the time. Then you don't
use
gpg-preset-passphrase, but put, e.g., this in your
gpg-agent.conf
default-cache-ttl 4294967295
max-cache-ttl 4294967295
and unlock your key by doing one decryption:
$ echo Open Sesame | gpg -r develop1 -e | gpg -d
This will pop up a pinentry for your passphrase, and since you
set the
cache-ttl to infinity, it will never popup a pinentry again on
decryptions until you restart gpg-agent. It's a pretty good
workflow
that uses all parts as they were intended.
HTH,
Peter.
|
