On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 8:25 AM, Allan McRae <[email protected]> wrote: > On 23/04/11 09:32, Dan McGee wrote: >> >> Allan and I today, and Denis in the past, noticed some issues with >> having a shared public key database and locking that gpg wants to do >> when reading from it. Here is an interesting bit from the apt >> changelog: >> >> apt (0.6.2) experimental; urgency=low >> * Provide apt-key with a secret keyring and a trustdb, even though we >> would never use them, because it blows up if it doesn't have them >> >>> From what I gather, they don't use the trustdb for the reasons we are >> >> seeing; instead it looks like they have another keyring named >> "trusted.gpg" and go forth with the assumption that everything in >> there is to be trusted. >> > > Looking into this, I believe that we are hitting an entirely separate issue. > The reason for a lack of trustdb in the Debian case appears to be more to > do with keyring management that anything else. Well sure...that was my point and what I gathered though- if you have a keyring that has keys you only trust, you don't need a trust DB, no?
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ch7 Debian does not provide signed packages but provides a mechanism available since Debian 4.0 (codename etch) to check for downloaded package's integrity[52]. For more information, see Secure apt, Section 7.5.2. http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ch7#s-apt-0.6 gpg is the tool used in secure apt to sign files and check their signatures. apt-key is a program that is used to manage a keyring of gpg keys for secure apt. The keyring is kept in the file /etc/apt/trusted.gpg (not to be confused with the related but not very interesting /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg). apt-key can be used to show the keys in the keyring, and to add or remove a key. > The main issue here is that gpg(me) creates a lock file in the keyrings home > directory whenever it uses a keyring. Our keyring directory only has write > permissions for the root user and thus when pacman is not being run as root > (such as the "pacman -Qip <pkg>" case), it can not create a lock file. Yes, totally understand. However, it only creates said lock file IF a trustdb has content > We can work around this by making the /etc/pacman.d/gnupg directory have 777 > permissions. The {pubring,secring,trustdb},gpg files will > still have only root write permissions so I guess this is safe as long as > those files are created as part of the pacman package itself... Also, unless > I am missing something even if other files are added in that directory by a > user, they should not affect gpg. Still... 777 permissions on that > directory sounds scary. This sounds scary and not good at all to me... > Anyway, doing this makes the signature validation with -Qip work for > non-root users (using Dan's gpg branch WIP patches). > > Note that GPG itself has an option not to do locking (with a big warning > about that being bad...), and I thought maybe we could do that for the > non-root usage case, but it looks like gpgme can not do that.
