Remote signing

Dave Symonds dasymond at it.usyd.edu.au
Tue Apr 20 01:47:57 CEST 2004


Hi All,

I have a slightly unusual setup that I would like to use GnuPG in, and wanted
to ask for some guidance. At my Uni we have a Sun machine that runs all the
mail stuff, and where I mostly prefer to do all my mail reading/composing from.
However, I don't want to entrust my GPG private key(s) to that system, and
would prefer to keep them on my laptop (or a USB key). What my ideal setup
would be is for my mailer (mutt) running on the mail server to call out to
a little script that would connect securely (via ssh) to my laptop, on which
would pop up a window showing the message and prompting for the passphrase to
sign that message (encryption isn't so important at the moment). The signed
message would be sent back, and then emailed out.

This seems reasonably secure to me, and shouldn't be too difficult for me to
code up. Does this sound like a reasonable approach? Has it been done before?
Am I completely daft?


Thanks,

Dave.

-- 
David Symonds
USyd::SITRG::PhD Student
http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~dasymond/



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