On Wed, 29 May 2013, shawn wilson wrote:

This is sort of a trusting trust question. However, is there a way to
have gpg verify it has not been altered? Maybe by compiling it with an
internal key file and it asking for a password before decrypting
itself and then presenting some type of verification. I'm asking
whether something like this exists or is possible? Ie, how does
malware do integrety checking / try to thwart people from running it
if something is amiss? Can this type of thing be put into gpg?

If you run your (linux) kernel in FIPS mode, by passing fips=1 as kernel
argument, some OSes such as RHEL or CentOS indeed do have .hmac files
they check against the supported crypto libraries to see they have been
tampered with. That currently covers libgcrypt, openssl nss and gnutls
and the fips approved kernel algorithms.

Fips mode also disables non-fips approved (eg blowfish) or weak (eg md5)
algorithms.

But it's a race. Any (root/admin) compromise on your OS and those checking
functions can also be compromised.

Paul
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