quickpgp

quickpgp

quickpgp is a wonderful method of doing common pgp operations in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about with keyrings.

But It is mainly a demonstraton of using golang's openpgp package.

Purpose

GPG assumes you're going to be part of a massive public key infrastructure, with support for multiple keys, kept on keyrings, signed by third parties, shared via keyservers, chosen by key IDs. blah blah blah.

However, you're subject to a requirement to regularly send someone a PGP signed file, where the public key has been shared out-of-band. This often comes up as part of some convoluted EDI process.

And, of course, you want your end of this to be automated. You want the key to live with the process, not in the home directory of the (system or real) user who happens to be invoking the process. And you want this process to maintain keys separately from your user keys and keyrings, which you use for other purposes.

Maintaining a PGP "home directory" for keyring storage is slightly too complicated. Some combination of options always seems to make a ~/.gnupg no matter what you do. And if this exists, sometimes keyrings in it get search/included even if you don't want them to be. There is a way to use gpg in a batch and "immediate" mode, but it's not straight forward. So you end up with stuff like gpg-tmp. Which mostly works, except when it doesn't. And then there's having to remember to ASCII armor your keys. And backing up the imported keyrings.

quickpgp gets rid of all that. Sometimes, you just want to sign a file with a key you have right there.

Compliation

$ make

Usage

Create a key pair

This is not strictly necessary, since you can also use files containing keys extracted from a regular opengpg/pgp keyring.

$ quickpgp genkey bedrock
$ ls -l bedrock*
-rw------- 1 fred flintstones  3457 Jan  1  1961 bedrock.key.asc
-rw-rw-r-- 1 fred flintstones  1692 Aug  1  1961 bedrock.pub.asc

Produces bedrock.key.asc and bedrock.pub.asc.

By default, it will use LOGNAME, COMMENT (usually empty), and HOSTNAME from the environment in order to set the identity of the key.

$ LOGNAME=neo \
  COMMENT="follow the white rabbit" \
  HOSTNAME="nebuchadnezzar.example.com" \
  quickpgp genkey matrix
$ ls -l matrix*
-rw------- 1 neo theone        3457 Mar 31  1999 matrix.key.asc
-rw-rw-r-- 1 neo theone        1692 Mar 31  1999 matrix.pub.asc

Sign a file

$ quickpgp sign file bedrock.key.asc

Produces file.sig.asc, containing the detached signature.

Verify a signature

$ quickpgp verify file bedrock.pub.asc

This will output either an error message or Good signature from "<identity>" on stderr. The exit code will be 0 if the signature is good.

Get information about a key file

Shows information about the key. The format is similar to the output of gpg --list-[secret-]keys.

$ quickpgp indentify matrix.key.asc
matrix.key.asc
--------------
sec   2048 /DF2FE68C75DF3663 1999-03-31T00:00:01Z
      Key fingerprint = DD5D AC8C C901 8142 9F39  3760 DF2F E68C 75DF 3663

pub   2048 /DF2FE68C75DF3663 1999-03-31T00:00:01Z
      Key fingerprint = DD5D AC8C C901 8142 9F39  3760 DF2F E68C 75DF 3663
uid                          neo (follow the white rabbit) <neo@nebuchadnezzar.example.com>
sub   2048 /831D828900A7CB9A 1999-03-31T00:00:01Z

$ quickpgp identify matrix.pub.asc 
matrix.pub.asc
--------------
pub   2048 /DF2FE68C75DF3663 1999-03-31T00:00:01Z
      Key fingerprint = DD5D AC8C C901 8142 9F39  3760 DF2F E68C 75DF 3663
uid                          neo (follow the white rabbit) <neo@nebuchadnezzar.example.com>
sub   2048 /831D828900A7CB9A 1999-03-31T00:00:01Z