AW: WINDOWS - Adding passphrase to gpg via command line

Peter Lebbing peter at digitalbrains.com
Wed Jun 15 14:35:11 CEST 2016


Hi,

> Any further ideas? I am despairing slowly but surely...

When I purposely enter the wrong passphrase, the PRESET_PASSPHRASE
command succeeds, but subsequently the pinentry will pop up to prompt
for the correct passphrase when I try to do anything with the key.

So you might have a mistake in the passphrase?

You could create a test key and set its passphrase to be test, and
explicitly use the hexified version of the word test to try if it works
then, since we obviously can't tell you if you've made a mistake with
hexifying your real passphrase :-).

By the way, depending on your situation, it might not be worse to use
your key without a passphrase. Your key is encrypted when stored on disk
so that an attacker getting hold of the file doesn't yet have your key.
However, when you use gpg-preset-passphrase in a way that stores the
passphrase argument plainly on disk as well, the attacker can simply
read that file as well and decrypt your key. In such situations, the
encryption serves no purpose (other than to make you despair slowly but
surely). But in other situations, it can be more secure to use a
passphrase, so it all depends.

HTH,

Peter.

-- 
I use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in combination with Enigmail.
You can send me encrypted mail if you want some privacy.
My key is available at <http://digitalbrains.com/2012/openpgp-key-peter>



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