It’s especially useful for both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography: whether you are signing binaries or archives encrypting or decrypting files with keys or merely symmetrically encrypting them with a pass phrase, GPG is simply a great tool to have around.īut GnuPG is also useful in Emacs. GNU Privacy Guard ( GnuPG) is a powerful tool and a free implementation of the OpenPGP standard. Keeping Secrets in Emacs with GnuPG & EasyPG I will also show you how to use the auth-source package – a unified interface for different secrets backends – and how you can use it to automatically log in to various external services with public-private keys. This article will teach you how to use Emacs’s native support for GnuPG – a package called EasyPG, or epa – to both sign/verify and encrypt/decrypt files, and how you can use this knowledge to store secrets that Emacs can understand. Depending on your level of paranoia (it’s not paranoia if they really are watching you…) the advice in this article may not be enough but for most, though, keeping your secrets encrypted on your file system is an easy way of keeping your secrets secret.Įmacs, obviously, can do this for you, and in a variety of ways. It's possible that your configuration for gpg-agent autostart already includes SSH support (the default one in Ubuntu 13.Storing your secrets in plain text is Bad Idea whether it’s your Vogon Poetry or your e-mail credentials.You probably also don't want your SSH keys unlocked for the whole session, and might want to use/configure ssh-agent or gpg-agent.On a final note, it may be wise to also disable the SSH component of Gnome Keyring, since:.After logging off and on again, just gpg-agent should be running, and it does respond both to settings in ~/.gnupg/nf and to SIGHUP signals.However, if you need to, refer this post for some information on how to configure it. At least for me, running Ubuntu 13.04, that's true. It's possible you already have the necessary settings for gpg-agent to autostart.You can do this by removing (or renaming to something other than *.desktop) the file /etc/xdg/autostart/sktop.This answer provides some details on the available options for it.Īnother way is to disable the GPG component of the Gnome Keyring, so that gpg-agent is used:

Your GPG secrets are probably being handled by the Gnome Keyring, even if gpg-agent is running. Let me begin by saying I had the exact same issue.

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