[GTALUG] GnuPG Woes...

Bob Jonkman bjonkman at sobac.com
Sat Dec 27 01:58:18 UTC 2014


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I'd try to restore an older keyring and try with that.  If you get the
same results you can always put the current keyring back.

You could also try to install GnuPG 1.x and use that. GnuPG 1.x
doesn't have all the command line options that GnuPG 2.x does, but 1.x
should still be able to decrypt a file.

There's also a new version, GnuPG 2.1.x which I haven't used yet, but
may provide better diagnostics.

There's an unlikely chance that your encrypted file is corrupted in
such a manner as to throw signature errors; did you try one of your
backed-up files?

- --Bob.


On 26/12/14 12:06 AM, Peter King wrote:
> I could use some help from people who are more expert at GnuPG than
> I am, which is most people.
> 
> Using GnuPG 2.0.26 and libcrypt 1.6.2, running under Gentoo with
> kernel 3.17.4, all at the command line.
> 
> I have a gpg key (since 2004) and it's always worked well for me.
> Just today, though, I tried to use it to decrypt a file I'd
> successfully decrupted many times in the past:
> 
> $ gpg -d File_to_Decrypt > decrypted_file
> 
> I kept getting a "bad session key" error.  After doing some
> googling, I eventually tried the suggestion to run:
> 
> $  gpgconf --reload
> 
> After doing so, however, when I try to decrypt the file as before:
> 
> $ gpg -d File_to_Decrypt > decrypted_file
> 
> gpg now asks for the data file, and when I offer File_to_Decrypt, I
> get back a list of of signatures, each correctly identified with my
> DSA key ID (as shown by the command gpg --listkeys), but each entry
> is followed by the line "BAD signature from <my_ID> [ultimate]" --
> which seems like very bad news indeed.
> 
> Naturally, the encrypted file is valuable (to me), and I have
> backup encrypted copies, but nothing in clear...
> 
> Well, the gnupg key hasn't changed since February 2004, and it's
> worked fine all the way to at least mid-October 2014, the last time
> I encrypted/decrypted the file.  Now I'm more or less clueless.
> What should I try next?
> 

Bob Jonkman <bjonkman at sobac.com>          Phone: +1-519-669-0388
SOBAC Microcomputer Services             http://sobac.com/sobac/
http://bob.jonkman.ca/blogs/    http://sn.jonkman.ca/bobjonkman/
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