hardwired key

Frank Tobin ftobin@neverending.org
Fri Aug 24 18:45:01 2001


As a person who has written several programs that interact with GnuPG in
some way, many of which use automated test cases, I would find it very
useful if GnuPG had embedded in it a hard-wired public/private 'sample'
keypair.  A hard-wired keypair would allow me to create automated tests
using public/private key operations without having to worry about the
existence of a keypair on the system my software is being tested on and
having to ship a test public and private keyring and around all the time.

An example of where a hardwired key would be useful is GnuPG::Interface
(Perl module), which the distribution of carries around a keyring just so
the test cases can utilize public-key encryption and signing operations.

Another example is GnuPGInterface (Python module), for which the test
cases do not utilize keyrings (I only test with --symmetric), simply
because it would be cumbersome.

Anyways, it's a thought.  For any product that wishes to do automated
testing around GnuPG a hard-wired key would be very useful, I feel.
Comments?

-- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/