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Maniphest T3372

Long preference lists resetting each other
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Description

After quite a few years, I finally resolved to come up with a stronger, more flexible key for everyday use. Once it was generated, I proceeded to edit it's preferences, minded to allow every cipher, digest and compression available, only sorted out by strength.

The problem I've encounter is the following: it all works fine so long as every preference is set at once. E.g.

setpref TWOFISH AES256 CAMELLIA256 AES192 CAMELLIA192 AES CAMELLIA128 BLOWFISH IDEA CAST5 3DES SHA512 SHA384 SHA256 SHA224 RIPEMD160 SHA1 BZIP2 ZLIB ZIP Uncompressed (don't mind the order)

Howbeit, if I were to set one after the other (say all ciphers first, then all digests and finally all compressions) then the preferences set for the later will cause the others to reset back to "none" (SHA1, ZIP/Uncompressed)

Basically there's nothing in the standard that should keep a user from being able to make use of every preference by setting them at different times (neither is there anything in the official manual that would hint me to believe otherwise), so it's possible that this is an oversight and therefore do I report it today.

2.1.23 tested on 32-Bit WinXP SP3.
Best regards.

Details

Version
2.1.23

Event Timeline

Kelbom68 created this task.Aug 26 2017, 4:58 PM
• werner triaged this task as Normal priority.Aug 26 2017, 6:22 PM
• werner added projects: gnupg, OpenPGP.
• werner added a subscriber: • werner.

The way the setpref command works is implementation specific and thus the OpenPGP standard is irrelevant here
.
Are you requesting a change in the behaviour of the setpref command? That would not be easy to implement for backward compatibility.

Kelbom68 added a comment.Aug 26 2017, 7:39 PM

Well, I'd expect gpg not to alter my digest/compression preferences when changing my cipher preferences and vice versa. So if a user's going to have to lose his previously set preferences for a key in this manner because that's the only reasonably viable way of maintaining backwards compatibility, I think it would be appropriate to let him know beforehand and also suggest that he set it all up at once (as I've so described above) so that nothing is lost in the process.

Again, this isn't for me anymore because I've already figured out how to get around it, but had I not used showpref to corroborate the changes, I'd have never found out gpg was messing with my key preferences behind my back.