graphical OpenPGP signing assistant
Project description
Synopsis
pip install gcaff gcaff --keyring keys-to-sign.asc
What is gcaff?
gcaff is a graphical tool for signing OpenPGP keys. Its main use case is for signing many keys at once, after a keysigning party for example.
Features include:
display photo IDs and select for signing
sign with multiple signing keys in one pass
choose the certification level on a per-key basis
email each signature separately, only to the associated email address
How does it differ from caff?
gcaff is heavily influenced by caff. Apart from caff being a command line program and gcaff having a GUI, there are a few important differences from caff:
gcaff does not remove uids from keys. caff sends only the uid that was signed to each email address. For now, gcaff sends all uids, but only one uid will have the new signature.
gcaff sends photo uid or freeform uid signatures to all email addresses on a key. If a uid does not have an email address, this “scatter-gun” strategy is used so that the signature still has a chance of reaching the key owner.
gcaff has no pinentry mechanism; users must have a working gpg-agent to use gcaff.
gcaff currently requires the user to supply a file containing keys to be signed; no keys are fetched from keyservers.
Cryptographic concerns
gcaff currently signs keys using the SHA256 digest. Future work may allow users to choose a digest based on the capabilities of their GnuPG implementation.
Under no circumstances are any secret keys exported from the user’s GnuPG home directory. The corresponding public keys are exported to a temporary GnuPG keyring during the signing process.
No keys in the user’s GnuPG home directory are modified during the signing process. Once signing is complete, all the signatures are written to a file whose location is reported. The user may import keys from this file into her regular keyring. A future version may offer to perform this step for the user.
Dependencies
GnuPG and gpg-agent
Python 2.7
PyGTK >=2, <3
a local mailer (SMTP), e.g. sendmail
Debian / Ubuntu
Install Python 2.7 and PyGTK in the normal way for your operating system. Note that on many systems PyGTK cannot be installed with pip.
To install dependencies on a Debian or Ubuntu system (or other systems using APT):
sudo apt-get install gnupg gnupg-agent postfix
If gnupg-agent was not previously installed you will probably need to log out and log in again to ensure that gpg-agent is running and the appropriate environment variables are set.
During the postfix configuration dialog ensure you select Internet Site as the “General type of mail configuration”. If postfix is not accepting mail you can run the configuration again:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix
Installation
To install for all users, on a Unix system:
sudo pip install gcaff
To perform an installation to user site-packages:
pip install gcaff --user
Ensure that the user site bin/ directory is on the PATH if installing to user site-packages.
License
gcaff is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Contributing
Bug reports, general feedback, patches and translations are welcome.
To submit a patch, please use git send-email or generate a pull/merge request. Write a well formed commit message. If your patch is nontrivial, add a copyright notice (or, if appropriate, update an existing notice) at the top of each file added or changed.
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