Re: Fix needed for communication with gpg-agent

[Sascha Wilde <wilde@sha-bang.de>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

>     I think this suggestion is based on a misunderstanding -- the security
>     problems in the current implementation (when not using gpg-agent) has
>     nothing to do with caching, it comes form the fact, that emacs writes
>     the the passphrase to an temporary file (which is then feed to gpg).
[...]
> If all we have to do is avoid passing it thru a temporary file,
> there must be lots of other ways to avoid that.  Could it be passed
> through a pipe or a socket?
>
> Someone says it already is:
[...]
> Does this mean the problem is already fixed?

Yes.  This problem was already solved (as said in another mail, I
forgot it was).

But there are still some more subtle security problems left, which
IIRC were discussed in the original thread, too:  If emacs caches the
passphrase there is no way to protect the passphrase from being
written to swap, when the system decides to swap out parts of emacs.

pgp-agent and pinentry on the other hand are trying hard to prevent
the passphrase from getting swaped out or written to hd by any other
means.

So in conclusion: the main security problem was solved, but it is
still preferable to use gpg-agent.

sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde : VI is to EMACS as masturbation is to making love:
             : effective and always available but probably not your
             : first choice...