Re: gnome-keyring Gnome Keyring and gpg

[Stef Walter <stefw gnome org>]

On 08.04.2015 22:37, Neal H. Walfield wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to resume the discussion about GnuPG and Gnome Keyring.  I
> read the thread from last Auguest [1], but I couldn't find much more
> information.  Stef, could you please tell me exactly what Gnome
> Keyring needs to do?
>
> As I understand the issue, Gnome Keyring wants to cache the password
> for the secret key.  It seems to me that the easiest solution is to
> direct GnuPG to use a special pinentry program that is Gnome Keyring
> aware.  Basically, gnupg invokes this program when it needs a
> password.  But, instead of immediately showing a dialog, it first
> checks whether Gnome Keyring has cached the password.  If not, it uses
> a Gnome-themed dialog to prompt the user for the password.  If the
> password is accepted, it can then save it in the Gnome Keyring.  I
> suspect that this is much simpler than implementing a gpg-agent proxy.

Indeed. That seems like the best approach.

There's a GSoC proposal to do work on this over the Summer.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode/2015/Ideas#Confirmed_Ideas
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742094

One thing that seems to be missing is getting a full keyid in the
pinentry for use when optionally storing the passphrase in
gnome-keyring. In theory one can "screen scrape" a short keyid this out
of the prompt message ... but that's pretty fragile.

So a bit of additional work to have gpg2 pass an Assuan OPTION with the
keyid or a unique identifier, if that's preferrable. The absence of
which would indicate that the passphrase does not belong to a stable
entity (like a key).

Cheers,

Stef