gpg: malformed CRC

David Shaw dshaw at jabberwocky.com
Thu Aug 5 17:47:54 CEST 2004


On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 01:09:09PM -0700, vedaal at hush.com wrote:
> On Wed Aug 4 21:19:12 CEST 2004,  Daviv Shaw wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Can you post a short sample message that works with PGP but not GnuPG?
> 
> in general,
> any armored pgp message that omits the checksum and the footer 
> (both at once) will cause a GnuPG error message of:
> 'gpg: malformed CRC'
> and be un-openable in GnuPG,
> (unless the --ignore-crc-error option is used,
> in which case, the error message is the same, but GnuPG will decrypt
> it),
> but will still be able to be decrypted by PGP,
> without any error messages.

I think PGP is correct here.  The spec says the checksum is a MAY, so
it should be legal to have an armored message with no checksum at all.
I keep meaning to change that in 1.3.x.

Though, of course, just because the checksum is optional doesn't make
it smart to leave it out.  There won't be any option to not generate a
checksum, but if you chop it off, I think GnuPG should accept the
message.

David



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