I'm attempting to use gpg to encrypt account information entered via a web application which will then be emailed to an external site(a single destination). Just to verify my understanding(and please correct me if I'm wrong), in a normal usage scenario, I would use the public key of my email recipient to encrypt the messages. To ensure that the public key being used hasn't been compromised, I would sign it using my private key. This way if someone was to alter the public key, gpg would detect that the signatures don't match during the encryption process and complain.
Now to complicate things, my webapp isn't dedicated to me. It's an Apache server that runs as www:www or something like that. So I can't access the webserver user directly. I was thinking that I would use my own account to sign the key and use the --homedir option to point at my .gnupg directory. I was wanted to make that directory group owned by the webserver group(www) and make it group read-only. I was concerned about giving group write access because anyone/process in the webserver group would be able to compromise the keys. > gpg --homedir=/Users/lenny/.gnupg --output test.pgp --encrypt -- recipient [EMAIL PROTECTED] $HOME/x.txt gpg: WARNING: unsafe ownership on homedir `/Users/lenny/.gnupg' gpg: failed to create temporary file `/Users/ lenny/.gnupg/.#lk0x5008f0.lennylt.20080': Permission denied gpg: fatal: can't create lock for `/Users/lenny/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg' secmem usage: 1408/1408 bytes in 2/2 blocks of pool 1408/32768 Now I've been able to get it to work by using the following: > gpg --homedir=/Users/lenny/.gnupg --output test.pgp --encrypt -- no-random-seed-file --lock-never --recipient [EMAIL PROTECTED] $HOME/x.txt --no-random-seed-file as far as I can tell only impacts performance (encryption performance?) which I can live with. It won't work without the --lock-never, but I was concerned about using that. The documentation states: <quote> Disable locking entirely. This option should be used only in very special environments, where it can be assured that only one process is accessing those files. A bootable floppy with a stand-alone encryption system will probably use this. Improper usage of this option may lead to data and key corruption. </quote> It seems that all I need is to read the keys, so do I still need to be concerned about key corruption even if multiple processes may be accessing the files? Thanks, -lenny Lenny Marks Senior Software Engineer American Physical Society [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
