adding text to detached signature files

Hauke Laging mailinglisten at hauke-laging.de
Fri Oct 14 01:08:12 CEST 2011


Hello,

I am building a system at work for automatic creation of PDF files and sending 
them by mail. I am thinking about adding a signature file (not by the key of 
the sendig person but by  a key belonging to the mail system; similar to a 
gateway signing solution just not singing the whole mail (and not using 
S/MIME) but just adding a second attachment which is a detached signature.

Probably most of you have experienced the "What strange attachment have you 
sent to me in your email? I can't open that..." effect. In order to minimize 
that I think of adding some text to the file so that

################################################
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (GNU/Linux)

[...]
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
################################################


becomes


################################################
This is a signature file. It allows you to verify that...

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (GNU/Linux)

[...]
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
################################################

The additional text has no impact on the GnuPG verification. Is this going to 
work with most other OpenPGP software, too?

If so wouldn't it be nice to have an option to put some explaining text 
(either a default text pointing at the GnuPG site or including a file) into 
each ASCII armored signature file? In a batch process that does not matter but 
for all manually created detached signatures.


Hauke
-- 
PGP: D44C 6A5B 71B0 427C CED3 025C BD7D 6D27 ECCB 5814
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