question on decryption with missing passcode

Henry Hertz Hobbit hhhobbit at securemecca.net
Thu Apr 18 01:39:22 CEST 2013


On 04/17/2013 09:05 PM, Beith, Linda wrote:

> Gpg: can't open 'rwu.dbdump_Nov2012.sql.gz.gpg'
> Gpg: decrypt_message filed: file open error

Daniel Kahn Gillmor is correct on this being a file permissions
problem or maybe an OS problem for a file of that large size.
Like Daniel, I assume the first.

I assume from what you said that it is encrypted with a symmetric
cipher rather than a public key.  You need to rule out something
encrypted with public key in which case only you rather than you
and the sender can decrypt which can be done with a symmetric
cipher.

The best thing would be to make sure you have the same thing:

$ sha1sum -b rwu.dbdump_Nov2012.sql.gz.gpg

sha1sum may not be good enough for security but it is good enough
for file permission and corruption problems and should give you
the same sum on both your system and their system.  But the message
looks more like like a file permissions problem and in that case
even something as simple as sha1sum will also fail with a message
like "Permission denied".  If you get that do a:

$ ls -l rwu.dbdump_Nov2012.sql.gz.gpg

That gives the permissions on the file.  Make sure you have
read permissions (you are in the group specified for the
file or read acccess is also given to Other).

HHH




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