Integrate pinentry-mac into pinentry

Werner Koch wk at gnupg.org
Tue Feb 24 11:39:13 CET 2015


On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 16:13, patrick at enigmail.net said:

> That's a _very_ good idea!

Seconded.

> I'd say that this should be OK. Automake should probably simply be
> able to determine that it's compiling for OS X and then use the XCode
> project.

Nope.  That that is a bad idea.  The build system is based on standard
Makefiles generated via automake and autoconf and I am strongly against
any other build systems.  We have this discussion every few years
related to Windows and I do not want to repeat this.  It is important to
be able to cross-build everything using a free (and audit-able platform).
Form my understanding Xcode is a non-text proprietary thing like Visual
Studio projects for Windows.

If there is a sound reason why _autoconf_ can't work on that platform, a
dedicated config file might be acceptable (cf. the VMS port).  But for a
BSD based OS I can's see a compelling reason.

>> 4. pinentry-mac allows the calling app to define a custom message 
>> to show. This is implemented using PINENTRY_USER_DATA. We allow 
>> placeholders like %KEYID and %USERID. To fill the placeholders, we
>>  parse the description from pinentry. This works in the most
>> cases. The reason for this feature is, to allow some more
>> informative and readable messages. e.g. We can tell the user for
>> which email/file, he enters the passphrase. What do you think about
>> that? Is this a desirable feature for pinentry?
>
> I think this is a desirable feature of pinentry in general. Other
> tools could profit from it as well.

This violates the security barrier of gpg-agent.  Any application could
trick a user into doing things he does not want.  For keys controlled by
gpg-agent the shown key identification should come from gpg-agent
without any user overridable string.

It is a different thing to allow additional information to be displayed.
If there is a need for it it can be added but it should be specified in
the gpg-agent/pinentry protocol.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.




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