pinentry-curses 0.9.1

Please update to pinentry 0.95 and try again. You may also use the gpg-agent
option --debug-pinentry which shows the communication between gpg-agent and
pinentry.

I compiled pinentry version 0.9.5 and tried to regenerate my keys. The good news
is that the curses window appeared and I could enter my passphrase. The bad news
is that after I entered the passphrase(with the repetition), the program
freezed, not returning any prompt and not giving any sign of life(I checked with
top to be sure and nothing).

Also, when I tried to use the --debug-pinentry, gpg didn't recognize it as a
valid argument. I use gpg 2.1.6.

Here is the content of my gpg-agent.conf:
debug-pinentry
log-file /home/fxleblanc/gpg-errors.txt
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses

Here is the content of my log file:
gpg: reading options from '/home/fxleblanc/.gnupg/gpg.conf'
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.6; Copyright (C) 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

gpg: enabled debug flags: packet mpi crypto filter iobuf memory cache memstat
trust hashing cardio ipc clock lookup extprog

gpg: signal Interrupt caught ... exiting

I interrupted the program because it wasn't doing anything after I entered my
passphrase.

I can't reproduce this. I'm using pinentry 0.9.5 and GnuPG from git. When I
generate a key, it talks nearly 3 minutes for GnuPG to gather the required
amount of entropy, but it eventually returns. Attaching to gpg-agent using gdb,
it appears that gpg-agent is "suck" in the generate key function:

  #9  0x00007f13a08da9ce in ?? () from /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcrypt.so.20
  (gdb) 
  #10 0x00007f13a08ca2db in gcry_pk_genkey ()
     from /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcrypt.so.20
  (gdb) 
  #11 0x000000000041f51f in agent_genkey (ctrl=0x1b69e80, cache_nonce=0x0, 
      keyparam=0x7f1398001e70 "(genkey(rsa(nbits 4:1024)))", keyparamlen=27, 
      no_protection=0, override_passphrase=0x0, preset=0, outbuf=0x7f139fccfdb0)
      at ../../../gnupg/agent/genkey.c:479
  479	  rc = gcry_pk_genkey (&s_key, s_keyparam );

So, I seriously doubt that this is a problem with pinentry. And also I doubt
that it is a problem with GnuPG. Most likely, you need to wait for the system
to generate more entropy.

If you think gpg or gpg-agent is really hung, it would be nice if you could use
gdb to attach and then get a backtrace and post that here.

Thanks!

Neal

Hi Neal, you are right about the entropy. I tought it was gpg but I think it's
because my system is too minimal to produce enough entropy. I finally decided to
generate my keys in another machine and transfer them to my minimal
installation. Now it works perfectly, with pinentry 0.9.5.

Thanks for your help,

Regards,

Felix