Fair enough. Let's wait and see what others think.

Also consider that it is possible to change the key usage flags. Thus it will never be clear whether one has a fixed or unfixed public key. I'd like to close this bug because it is currently also discussed in the IETF WG.

No info received.

There is another argument for respecting the usage flags: it trims the admissible key space, if key ID in the PKESK packet is zero ('wild card') and thus all private keys have to be considered for decryption.

I disagree, and you don't have to try to convince me, the decision is with werner. I just want to give my opinion:
Bug compatibility is nothing esoteric or bad especially for a general purpose backend tool like gnupg. Being open to accepting broken input is a good thing because it will mean that we can get people out of a "broken tool vendor lock in".

i agree with @Valodim that it would be better to not have a warning at all for an attempt to decrypt from secret key whose public key has never been marked as valid for encryption. A strict failure there (as with a strict failure for lack of mdc) is a better scenario than a warning. If the user controls the secret key and they decide they want to be able to decrypt with it, they should be able to mark it as decryption-capable (if that's really what they want) and retry. But this is an action only for experts.

The same *cannot* be said for a subkey that is marked specifically for certification or signing, and not for decryption.

I understand the real world requirement for decrypting messages that have been encrypted to a revoked or expired key.

I don't see a problem. If you have the private key you can and will use it. I guess your concern is an oracle?

Dear aheinecke,

Hi Adam,

To compute the key validity (trust) more information may be needed and we can only do that after the changes have been saved. Further, no-auto-chec-trustdb will anyway delay that computation until "gpg --check-trustdb" is run (e.g. by a cron job).

success, thank you for the help!

In GnuPG 2.1, secret keys are under control of gpg-agent. Currently, it is not deleted by gpg frontend.
Please run:

$ gpg -K --with-keygrip

IIRC, rfc2440 did not forbid partial length encoding for key-material so gpg could use that. rfc4880 limits partial length encoding to non-key-material which causes this error message.

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.

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.

Well, iff we implement that for gpg we also need to implement it for gpgsm.

A decision must be made what the desired behaviour should be.

• marcus (Marcus Brinkmann) <noreply@dev.gnupg.org> [20170622 16:41]:

So, the default change 7y ago and the world didn't end. Closing this.

So, the default change 7y ago and the world didn't end. Closing this.

Tested this again with 2.1.18 and it works now as expected. Export secret key
just exports a key if it has no passphrase. So I think this issue can be marked
as resolved.

It is a hack in OpenKeychain to allow the use of several devices. Frankly, I am
not sure whether this is really a good idea: The security is limited by the key
for the least secure device.

So i've tested this locally with:

    export GNUPGHOME=$(mktemp -d)
    gpg --quick-gen-key 'test user <test@example.org>'
    gpg --armor --export-secret-key 'test user <test@example.org>'

(choosing no passphrase during the prompts that come up during the quick-gen-key
step). The final export step works fine.

Can you show what steps you're taking that fail for you, Andre?

I'm using latest master and I still can't export a secret key without passphrase.

And Justus also has not closed this bug or wrote that he commited something
more. So I think the 2.1.13 announcement was mistaken and this problem still
exists. (Or am I missing some option / need a different pinentry mode?)

We got it for 2.1: -f or --recipient-file

Hi,
the 2.1.13 announcement has
"""

• gpg: Allow export of non-passphrase protected secret keys.

"""
(from https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2016q2/000390.html)
so this defect may be fixed with 2.1.13 I guess, cool!
Probably only need a test to confirm?

Replacing revoked keys made me wonder if we actually need an auto-refresh key.
If we try to return one valid key with --locate-keys wouldn't it make more sense
semantically if we use the auto-key-locate mechanisms with locate-keys when a
key is expired in the local store?

This would also work better for revoked keys where a Parcimonie style auto
refresh would pick up the revocation and locate-keys would then look for a new key.

I can confirm one defect with 2.1.11:
The ability to export a secret key without passphrase available in gnupg2.0
is gone. My use case is to write a testcase that automatically imports the key.

I did not work on this other than what I merged. What I did is to enhance our
fake pinentry program to allow it to supply different passphrases, make it write
a log so that we can quantify the pinentry interaction in test cases, and to add
an export test documenting the status quo.

The question at hand is whether dkg's patch or Justus work is the way to go. I
have not yet reviewed dkg's patch, though.

dgk: You are right that Pinentry may be used even with --batch. In fact gpgme
uses --batch and a Pinentry is used nevertheless.

Right, there are no technical means right now to inhibit the export of private
keys. However, it would be easy to add this by not allowing gpg-agent to tell
the client the key used to encrypt the import/export command of keys.

A user migyt have used no passphrase for a key in the believe that an
unprotected key can't be exported.