GPGSM(1) GNU Privacy Guard GPGSM(1)NAMEgpgsm - CMS encryption and signing tool
SYNOPSISgpgsm [--homedir dir] [--options file] [options] command [args]
DESCRIPTIONgpgsm is a tool similar to gpg to provide digital encryption and sign‐
ing servicesd on X.509 certificates and the CMS protocol. It is mainly
used as a backend for S/MIME mail processing. gpgsm includes a full
features certificate management and complies with all rules defined for
the German Sphinx project.
COMMANDS
Commands are not distinguished from options except for the fact that
only one command is allowed.
Commands not specific to the function
--version
Print the program version and licensing information. Not that
you can abbreviate this command.
--help, -h
Print a usage message summarizing the most usefule command-line
options. Not that you can abbreviate this command.
--warranty
Print warranty information.
--dump-options
Print a list of all available options and commands. Not that
you can abbreviate this command.
Commands to select the type of operation
--encrypt
Perform an encryption. The keys the data is encrypted too must
be set using the option --recipient.
--decrypt
Perform a decryption; the type of input is automatically deter‐
mined. It may either be in binary form or PEM encoded; auto‐
matic determination of base-64 encoding is not done.
--sign Create a digital signature. The key used is either the fist one
found in the keybox or those set with the --local-user option.
--verify
Check a signature file for validity. Depending on the arguments
a detached signatrue may also be checked.
--server
Run in server mode and wait for commands on the stdin.
--call-dirmngr command [args]
Behave as a Dirmngr client issuing the request command with the
optional list of args. The output of the Dirmngr is printed
stdout. Please note that file names given as arguments should
have an absulte file name (i.e. commencing with / because they
are passed verbatim to the Dirmngr and the working directory of
the Dirmngr might not be the same as the one of this client.
Currently it is not possible to pass data via stdin to the Dirm‐
ngr. command should not contain spaces.
This is command is required for certain maintaining tasks of the
dirmngr where a dirmngr must be able to call back to gpgsm. See
the Dirmngr manual for details.
--call-protect-tool arguments
Certain maintenance operations are done by an external program
call gpg-protect-tool; this is usually not installed in a direc‐
tory listed in the PATH variable. This command provides a sim‐
ple wrapper to access this tool. arguments are passed verbatim
to this command; use '--help' to get a list of supported opera‐
tions.
How to manage the certificates and keys
--gen-key
This command allows the interactive creation of a certifcate
signing request. It is commonly used along with the --output
option to save the created CSR into a file.
--list-keys
-k List all available certificates stored in the local key data‐
base. Note that the displayed data might be reformatted for
better human readability and illegal characters are replaced by
safe substitutes.
--list-secret-keys
-K List all available certificates for which a corresponding a
secret key is available.
--list-external-keys pattern
List certificates matching pattern using an external server.
This utilizes the dirmngr service.
--list-chain
Same as --list-keys but also prints all keys making up the
chain.
--dump-cert
--dump-keys
List all available certificates stored in the local key database
using a format useful mainly for debugging.
--dump-chain
Same as --dump-keys but also prints all keys making up the
chain.
--dump-secret-keys
List all available certificates for which a corresponding a
secret key is available using a format useful mainly for debug‐
ging.
--dump-external-keys pattern
List certificates matching pattern using an external server.
This utilizes the dirmngr service. It uses a format useful
mainly for debugging.
--keydb-clear-some-cert-flags
This is a debugging aid to reset certain flags in the key data‐
base which are used to cache certain certificate stati. It is
especially useful if a bad CRL or a weird running OCSP reponder
did accidently revoke certificate. There is no security issue
with this command because gpgsm always make sure that the valid‐
ity of a certificate is checked right before it is used.
--delete-keys pattern
Delete the keys matching pattern.
--export [pattern]
Export all certificates stored in the Keybox or those specified
by the optional pattern. Those pattern consist of a list of user
ids (see: [how-to-specify-a-user-id]). When used along with the
--armor option a few informational lines are prepended before
each block. There is one limitation: As there is no commonly
agreed upon way to pack more than one certificate into an ASN.1
structure, the binary export (i.e. without using armor) works
only for the export of one certificate. Thus it is required to
specify a pattern which yields exactly one certificate.
--export-secret-key-p12 key-id
Export the private key and the certificate identified by key-id
in a PKCS#12 format. When using along with the --armor option a
few informational lines are prepended to the output. Note, that
the PKCS#12 format is not very secure and this command is only
provided if there is no other way to exchange the private key.
(see: [option --p12-charset])
--import [files]
Import the certificates from the PEM or binary encoded files as
well as from signed-only messages. This command may also be
used to import a secret key from a PKCS#12 file.
--learn-card
Read information about the private keys from the smartcard and
import the certificates from there. This command utilizes the
gpg-agent and in turn the scdaemon.
--passwd user_id
Change the passphrase of the private key belonging to the cer‐
tificate specified as user_id. Note, that changing the
passphrase/PIN of a smartcard is not yet supported.
OPTIONS
GPGSM comes features a bunch ofoptions to control the exact behaviour
and to change the default configuration.
How to change the configuration
These options are used to change the configuraton and are usually found
in the option file.
--options file
Reads configuration from file instead of from the default per-
user configuration file. The default configuration file is
named `gpgsm.conf' and expected in the `.gnupg' directory
directly below the home directory of the user.
--homedir dir
Set the name of the home directory to dir. If his option is not
used, the home directory defaults to `~/.gnupg'. It is only
recognized when given on the command line. It also overrides
any home directory stated through the environment variable
`GNUPGHOME' or (on W32 systems) by means on the Registry entry
HKCU\Software\GNU\GnuPG:HomeDir.
-v
--verbose
Outputs additional information while running. You can increase
the verbosity by giving several verbose commands to gpgsm, such
as '-vv'.
--policy-file filename
Change the default name of the policy file to filename.
--agent-program file
Specify an agent program to be used for secret key operations.
The default value is the `/usr/local/bin/gpg-agent'. This is
only used as a fallback when the envrionment variable
GPG_AGENT_INFO is not set or a running agent can't be connected.
--dirmngr-program file
Specify a dirmngr program to be used for CRL checks. The
default value is `/usr/sbin/dirmngr'. This is only used as a
fallback when the environment variable DIRMNGR_INFO is not set
or a running dirmngr can't be connected.
--prefer-system-dirmngr
If a system wide dirmngr is running in daemon mode, first try to
connect to this one. Fallback to a pipe based server if this
does not work. Under Windows this option is ignored because the
system dirmngr is always used.
--disable-dirmngr
Entirely disable the use of the Dirmngr.
--no-secmem-warning
Don't print a warning when the so called "secure memory" can't
be used.
--log-file file
When running in server mode, append all logging output to file.
Certificate related options
--enable-policy-checks
--disable-policy-checks
By default policy checks are enabled. These options may be used
to change it.
--enable-crl-checks
--disable-crl-checks
By default the CRL checks are enabled and the DirMngr is used to
check for revoked certificates. The disable option is most use‐
ful with an off-line network connection to suppress this check.
--enable-trusted-cert-crl-check
--disable-trusted-cert-crl-check
By default the CRL for trusted root certificates are checked
like for any other certificates. This allows a CA to revoke its
own certificates voluntary without the need of putting all ever
issued certificates into a CRL. The disable option may be used
to switch this extra check off. Due to the caching done by the
Dirmngr, there won't be any noticeable performance gain. Note,
that this also disables possible OCSP checks for trusted root
certificates. A more specific way of disabling this check is by
adding the ``relax'' keyword to the root CA line of the
`trustlist.txt'
--force-crl-refresh
Tell the dirmngr to reload the CRL for each request. For better
performance, the dirmngr will actually optimize this by sup‐
pressing the loading for short time intervalls (e.g. 30 min‐
utes). This option is useful to make sure that a fresh CRL is
available for certificates hold in the keybox. The suggested
way of doing this is by using it along with the option --with-
validation for a key listing command. This option should not be
used in a configuration file.
--enable-ocsp
--disable-ocsp
Be default OCSP checks are disabled. The enable option may be
used to enable OCSP checks via Dirmngr. If CRL checks are also
enabled, CRLs will be used as a fallback if for some reason an
OCSP request won't succeed. Note, that you have to allow OCSP
requests in Dirmngr's configuration too (option --allow-ocsp and
configure dirmngr properly. If you don't do so you will get the
error code 'Not supported'.
--auto-issuer-key-retrieve
If a required certificate is missing while validating the chain
of certificates, try to load that certificate from an external
location. This usually means that Dirmngr is employed t search
for the certificate. Note that this option makes a "web bug"
like behavior possible. LDAP server operators can see which
keys you request, so by sending you a message signed by a brand
new key (which you naturally will not have on your local key‐
box), the operator can tell both your IP address and the time
when you verified the signature.
--validation-model name
This option changes the default validation model. The only pos‐
sible values are "shell" (which is the default) and "chain"
which forces the use of the chain model. The chain model is
also used if an option in the `trustlist.txt' or an attribute of
the certificate requests it. However the standard model (shell)
is in that case always tried first.
Input and Output
--armor
-a Create PEM encoded output. Default is binary output.
--base64
Create Base-64 encoded output; i.e. PEM without the header
lines.
--assume-armor
Assume the input data is PEM encoded. Default is to autodetect
the encoding but this is may fail.
--assume-base64
Assume the input data is plain base-64 encoded.
--assume-binary
Assume the input data is binary encoded.
--p12-charset name
gpgsm uses the UTF-8 encoding when encoding passphrases for
PKCS#12 files. This option may be used to force the passphrase
to be encoded in the specified encoding name. This is useful if
the application used to import the key uses a different encoding
and thus won't be able to import a file generated by gpgsm.
Commonly used values for name are Latin1 and CP850. Note that
gpgsm itself automagically imports any file with a passphrase
encoded to the most commonly used encodings.
--default-key user_id
Use user_id as the standard key for signing. This key is used
if no other key has been defined as a signing key. Note, that
the first --local-users option also sets this key if it has not
yet been set; however --default-key always overrides this.
--local-user user_id
-u user_id
Set the user(s) to be used for signing. The default is the
first secret key found in the database.
--recipient name
-r Encrypt to the user id name. There are several ways a user id
may be given (see: [how-to-specify-a-user-id]).
--output file
-o file
Write output to file. The default is to write it to stdout.
--with-key-data
Displays extra information with the --list-keys commands. Espe‐
cially a line tagged grp is printed which tells you the keygrip
of a key. This string is for example used as the file name of
the secret key.
--with-validation
When doing a key listing, do a full validation check for each
key and print the result. This is usually a slow operation
because it requires a CRL lookup and other operations.
When used along with --import, a validation of the certificate
to import is done and only imported if it succeeds the test.
Note that this does not affect an already available cwertificate
in the DB. This option is therefore useful to simply verify a
certificate.
--with-md5-fingerprint
For standard key listings, also print the MD5 fingerprint of the
certificate.
How to change how the CMS is created.
--include-certs n
Using n of -2 includes all certificate except for the root cert,
-1 includes all certs, 0 does not include any certs, 1 includes
only the signers cert (this is the default) and all other posi‐
tive values include up to n certificates starting with the
signer cert.
--cipher-algo oid
Use the cipher algorithm with the ASN.1 object identifier oid
for encryption. For convenience the strings 3DES, AES and
AES256 may be used instead of their OIDs. The default is 3DES
(1.2.840.113549.3.7).
Doing things one usually don't want to do.
--extra-digest-algo name
Sometimes signatures are broken in that they announce a differ‐
ent digest algorithm than actually used. gpgsm uses a one-pass
data processing model and thus needs to rely on the announcde
digest algorithms to properly hash the data. As a workaround
this option may be used to tell gpg to also hash the data using
the algorithm name; this slows processing down a little bit but
allows to verify such broken signatures. If gpgsm prints an
error like ``digest algo 8 has not been enabled'' you may want
to try this option, with 'SHA256' for name.
--faked-system-time epoch
This option is only useful for testing; it sets the system time
back or forth to epoch which is the number of seconds elapsed
since the year 1970. Alternativly epoch may be given as a full
ISO time string (e.g. "20070924T154812").
--with-ephemeral-keys
Include ephemeral flagged keys in the output of key listings.
--debug-level level
Select the debug level for investigating problems. level may be
one of:
none no debugging at all.
basic some basic debug messages
advanced
more verbose debug messages
expert even more detailed messages
guru all of the debug messages you can get
How these messages are mapped to the actual debugging flags is not
specified and may change with newer releases of this program. They are
however carefully selected to best aid in debugging.
--debug flags
This option is only useful for debugging and the behaviour may
change at any time without notice; using --debug-levels is the
preferred method to select the debug verbosity. FLAGS are bit
encoded and may be given in usual C-Syntax. The currently
defined bits are:
0 (1) X.509 or OpenPGP protocol related data
1 (2) values of big number integers
2 (4) low level crypto operations
5 (32) memory allocation
6 (64) caching
7 (128)
show memory statistics.
9 (512)
write hashed data to files named dbgmd-000*
10 (1024)
trace Assuan protocol
Note, that all flags set using this option may get overriden by
--debug-level.
--debug-all
Same as --debug=0xffffffff
--debug-allow-core-dump
Usually gpgsm tries to avoid dumping core by well written code
and by disabling core dumps for security reasons. However, bugs
are pretty durable beasts and to squash them it is sometimes
useful to have a core dump. This option enables core dumps
unless the Bad Thing happened before the option parsing.
--debug-no-chain-validation
This is actually not a debugging option but only useful as such.
It lets gpgsm bypass all certificate chain validation checks.
--debug-ignore-expiration
This is actually not a debugging option but only useful as such.
It lets gpgsm ignore all notAfter dates, this is used by the
regresssion tests.
--fixed-passphrase string
Supply the passphrase string to the gpg-protect-tool. This
option is only useful for the regression tests included with
this package and may be revised or removed at any time without
notice.
--no-common-certs-import
Suppress the import of common certificates on keybox creation.
All the long options may also be given in the configuration file
after stripping off the two leading dashes.
HOW TO SPECIFY A USER ID
There are different ways to specify a user ID to GnuPG. Some of them
are only valid for gpg others are only good for gpgsm. Here is the
entire list of ways to specify a key:
By key Id.
This format is deduced from the length of the string and its
content or 0x prefix. The key Id of an X.509 certificate are the
low 64 bits of its SHA-1 fingerprint. The use of key Ids is
just a shortcut, for all automated processing the fingerprint
should be used.
When using gpg an exclamation mark (!) may be appended to force
using the specified primary or secondary key and not to try and
calculate which primary or secondary key to use.
The last four lines of the example give the key ID in their long
form as internally used by the OpenPGP protocol. You can see the
long key ID using the option --with-colons.
234567C4
0F34E556E
01347A56A
0xAB123456
234AABBCC34567C4
0F323456784E56EAB
01AB3FED1347A5612
0x234AABBCC34567C4
By fingerprint.
This format is deduced from the length of the string and its
content or the 0x prefix. Note, that only the 20 byte version
fingerprint is available with gpgsm (i.e. the SHA-1 hash of the
certificate).
When using gpg an exclamation mark (!) may be appended to force
using the specified primary or secondary key and not to try and
calculate which primary or secondary key to use.
The best way to specify a key Id is by using the fingerprint.
This avoids any ambiguities in case that there are duplicated
key IDs.
1234343434343434C434343434343434
123434343434343C3434343434343734349A3434
0E12343434343434343434EAB3484343434343434
0xE12343434343434343434EAB3484343434343434
(gpgsm also accepts colons between each pair of hexadecimal digits
because this is the de-facto standard on how to present X.509 finger‐
prints.)
By exact match on OpenPGP user ID.
This is denoted by a leading equal sign. It does not make sense
for X.509 certificates.
=Heinrich Heine <heinrichh@uni-duesseldorf.de>
By exact match on an email address.
This is indicated by enclosing the email address in the usual
way with left and right angles.
<heinrichh@uni-duesseldorf.de>
By word match.
All words must match exactly (not case sensitive) but can appear
in any order in the user ID or a subjects name. Words are any
sequences of letters, digits, the underscore and all characters
with bit 7 set.
+Heinrich Heine duesseldorf
By exact match on the subject's DN.
This is indicated by a leading slash, directly followed by the
RFC-2253 encoded DN of the subject. Note that you can't use the
string printed by "gpgsm --list-keys" because that one as been
reordered and modified for better readability; use --with-colons
to print the raw (but standard escaped) RFC-2253 string
/CN=Heinrich Heine,O=Poets,L=Paris,C=FR
By exact match on the issuer's DN.
This is indicated by a leading hash mark, directly followed by a
slash and then directly followed by the rfc2253 encoded DN of
the issuer. This should return the Root cert of the issuer.
See note above.
#/CN=Root Cert,O=Poets,L=Paris,C=FR
By exact match on serial number and issuer's DN.
This is indicated by a hash mark, followed by the hexadecimal
representation of the serial number, then followed by a slash
and the RFC-2253 encoded DN of the issuer. See note above.
#4F03/CN=Root Cert,O=Poets,L=Paris,C=FR
By keygrip
This is indicated by an ampersand followed by the 40 hex digits
of a keygrip. gpgsm prints the keygrip when using the command
--dump-cert. It does not yet work for OpenPGP keys.
&D75F22C3F86E355877348498CDC92BD21010A480
By substring match.
This is the default mode but applications may want to explicitly
indicate this by putting the asterisk in front. Match is not
case sensitive.
Heine
*Heine
Please note that we have reused the hash mark identifier which was used
in old GnuPG versions to indicate the so called local-id. It is not
anymore used and there should be no conflict when used with X.509
stuff.
Using the RFC-2253 format of DNs has the drawback that it is not possi‐
ble to map them back to the original encoding, however we don't have to
do this because our key database stores this encoding as meta data.
EXAMPLES
$ gpgsm-er goo@bar.net <plaintext >ciphertext
gpgsm is often used as a backend engine by other software. To help
with this a machine interface has been defined to have an unambiguous
way to do this. This is most likely used with the --server command but
may also be used in the standard operation mode by using the --status-
fd option.
It is very important to understand the semantics used with signature
verification. Checking a signature is not as simple as it may sound
and so the ooperation si a bit complicated. In mosted cases it is
required to look at several status lines. Here is a table of all cases
a signed message may have:
The signature is valid
This does mean that the signature has been successfully veri‐
fied, the certificates are all sane. However there are two sub‐
cases with important information: One of the certificates may
have expired or a signature of a message itself as expired. It
is a sound practise to consider such a signature still as valid
but additional information should be displayed. Depending on
the subcase gpgsm will issue these status codes:
.RS
.TP signature valid and nothing did expire
GOODSIG, VALIDSIG, TRUST_FULLY
.TP signature valid but at least one certificate has expired
EXPKEYSIG, VALIDSIG, TRUST_FULLY
.TP signature valid but expired
EXPSIG, VALIDSIG, TRUST_FULLY
Note, that this case is currently not implemented.
.RE
The signature is invalid
This means that the signature verification failed (this is an
indication of af a transfer error, a programm error or tampering
with the message). gpgsm issues one of these status codes
sequences:
.RS
.TP BADSIG
.TP GOODSIG, VALIDSIG TRUST_NEVER
.RE
Error verifying a signature
For some reason the signature could not be verified, i.e. it
can't be decided whether the signature is valid or invalid. A
common reason for this is a missing certificate.
FILES
There are a few configuration files to control certain aspects of
gpgsm's operation. Unless noted, they are expected in the current home
directory (see: [option --homedir]).
gpgsm.conf
This is the standard configuration file read by gpgsm on
startup. It may contain any valid long option; the leading two
dashes may not be entered and the option may not be abbreviated.
This default name may be changed on the command line (see:
[option
--options]).
policies.txt
This is a list of allowed CA policies. This file should list
the object identifiers of the policies line by line. Empty
lines and lines starting with a hash mark are ignored. Policies
missing in this file and not marked as critical in the certifi‐
cate will print only a warning; certificates with policies
marked as critical and not listed in this file will fail the
signature verification.
For example, to allow only the policy 2.289.9.9, the file should
look like this:
# Allowed policies
2.289.9.9
qualified.txt
This is the list of root certificates used for qualified cer‐
tificates. They are defined as certificates capable of creating
legally binding signatures in the same way as handwritten signa‐
tures are. Comments start with a hash mark and empty lines are
ignored. Lines do have a length limit but this is not a serious
limitation as the format of the entries is fixed and checked by
gpgsm: A non-comment line starts with optional whitespace, fol‐
lowed by exactly 40 hex character, white space and a lowercased
2 letter country code. Additional data delimited with by a
white space is current ignored but might late be used for other
purposes.
Note that even if a certificate is listed in this file, this
does not mean that the certificate is trusted; in general the
certificates listed in this file need to be listed also in
`trustlist.txt'.
This is a global file an installed in the data directory (e.g.
`/usr/share/gnupg/qualified.txt'). GnuPG installs a suitable
file with root certificates as used in Germany. As new Root-CA
certificates may be issued over time, these entries may need to
be updated; new distributions of this software should come with
an updated list but it is still the responsibility of the Admin‐
istrator to check that this list is correct.
Everytime gpgsm uses a certificate for signing or verification
this file will be consulted to check whether the certificate
under question has ultimately been issued by one of these CAs.
If this is the case the user will be informed that the verified
signature represents a legally binding (``qualified'') signa‐
ture. When creating a signature using such a certificate an
extra prompt will be issued to let the user confirm that such a
legally binding signature shall really be created.
Because this software has not yet been approved for use with
such certificates, appropriate notices will be shown to indicate
this fact.
help.txt
This is plain text file with a few help entries used with pinen‐
try as well as a large list of help items for gpg and gpgsm.
The standard file has English help texts; to install localized
versions use filenames like `help.LL.txt' with LL denoting the
locale. GnuPG comes with a set of predefined help files in the
data directory (e.g. `/usr/share/gnupg/help.de.txt') and allows
overriding of any help item by help files stored in the system
configuration directory (e.g. `/etc/gnupg/help.de.txt'). For a
reference of the help file's syntax, please see the installed
`help.txt' file.
Note that on larger installations, it is useful to put predefined files
into the directory `/etc/skel/.gnupg/' so that newly created users
start up with a working configuration. For existing users the a small
helper script is provided to create these files (see: [addgnupghome]).
For internal purposes gpgsm creates and maintaines a few other files;
They all live in in the current home directory (see: [option --home‐
dir]). Only gpgsm may modify these files.
pubring.kbx
This a database file storing the certificates as well as meta
information. For debugging purposes the tool kbxutil may be
used to show the internal structure of this file.
random_seed
This content of this file is used to maintain the internal state
of the random number generator accross invocations. The same
file is used by other programs of this software too.
S.gpg-agent
If this file exists and the environment variable
`GPG_AGENT_INFO' is not set, gpgsm will first try to connect to
this socket for accessing gpg-agent before starting a new gpg-
agent instance. Under Windows this socket (which in reality be
a plain file describing a regular TCP litening port) is the
standard way of connecting the gpg-agent.
SEE ALSOgpg2(1), gpg-agent(1)
The full documentation for this tool is maintained as a Texinfo manual.
If GnuPG and the info program are properly installed at your site, the
command
info gnupg
should give you access to the complete manual including a menu struc‐
ture and an index.
GnuPG 2.0.9 2012-09-27 GPGSM(1)
