[PATCH 0/2] Prompting for the GPG password within Emacs

[Neil Roberts]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> The fewer tools that handle your OpenPGP passphrase the better, and
> future versions of GnuPG will not be able to work without the gpg-agent
> anyway (all secret key activity will be handled by the agent as of gnupg
> version 2.1, if i understand upstream's development plans correctly).

Ok, I didn't realise that GnuPG will be taking away for support for
directly prompting for passwords. I agree that using gpg-agent would be
better but this patch seemed to be simpler to get working in my use case
and it matches how mml currently handles it.

> Can you describe what you've tried in terms of using gpg-agent? where
> are your secret keys stored? are they on your local machine, or on the
> remote machine?

Both machines are trusted personal machines so I can put the keys on
either (or both). I think what would be ideal is if OpenSSH could
support gpg-agent forwarding like it does for ssh-agent. That way when
gpg needs a password it could prompt for it via GNOME Keyring on my
local machine. I thought about trying to patch OpenSSH but to be honest
I lost all motivation when I noticed that it is still maintained in CVS.
I found that someone else has made a patch to add support for forwarding
of arbitrary Unix domain sockets¹ but it is now out of date. I suppose
that could be used quite easily to do gpg-agent forwarding. I couldn't
find any feedback from any of the maintainers about why it isn't in the
main source code tree yet. It seems like quite a compelling feature. I'm
guessing (although I'm not sure) that it requires a change in the
protocol and presumably I would have to also compile the server from
source so it seemed like quite a lot of faff to start using that patch
and I opted for this simpler approach instead.

Regards,
- Neil

1. https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256
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