RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.
Bug 659512 - no chance to enter a password during key generation in command-line mode
Summary: no chance to enter a password during key generation in command-line mode
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED CANTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Classification: Red Hat
Component: gnupg2
Version: 6.0
Hardware: x86_64
OS: Linux
low
medium
Target Milestone: rc
: ---
Assignee: Tomas Mraz
QA Contact: BaseOS QE Security Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2010-12-02 23:05 UTC by Jim Kinney
Modified: 2020-06-11 12:33 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2010-12-06 09:45:01 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Jim Kinney 2010-12-02 23:05:30 UTC 
Description of problem: when generating a new gnupg key there is no opportunity to enter a key passphrase when working over an ssh connection at the command line.

Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? O
You need a Passphrase to protect your secret key.

gpg: cancelled by user
gpg: Key generation canceled.

Time interval between "You need a Passphrase" and "cancelled by user" is less than 1 second.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
gnupg2-2.0.14-4.el6.x86_64

How reproducible:


Steps to Reproduce:
1. start gpg-agent with gpg-agent --daemon and export the GPG_AGENT_INFO data.
2. export GPG_TTY=$(tty) data as well
3. gpg2 --gen-key and enter required data up through Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit?
  
Actual results:
gpg: cancelled by user
gpg: Key generation canceled.

Expected results:
expected to see generate random data, making key, etc.

Additional info:
Comment 2 Tomas Mraz 2010-12-03 08:11:35 UTC 
I cannot reproduce the problem. Do you have pinentry package installed? Do you use X forwarding on the ssh session?
Comment 3 Jim Kinney 2010-12-03 14:59:53 UTC 
Yes, pinentry is installed.

I've done some more digging into this: It works from the local console (without gpg-agent being set up at all). However it does NOT work by doing a su - <user> then gpg2 --gen-key.

It looks to be a tty issue with pinentry.
Comment 4 Jim Kinney 2010-12-03 16:01:59 UTC 
to replicate :

ssh:
create two user accounts on rhel6 server
log in as user1 over ssh
su - root
su - user2
gpg --gen-key (fails)

on console:
login as root
su - user2
gpg --gen-key (fails)

on console:
login as user2
gpg --gen-key succeeds at providing the password entry ability.

over ssh:
ssh into server as user2
gpg --gen-key succeeds with password screen
Comment 5 Tomas Mraz 2010-12-06 09:45:01 UTC 
Yes, su does not open a new pty for the su-ed user session. Unfortunately this is a design limitation of the GnuPG2 that it always requires access rights to open the tty for the pinentry. The workaround would be to use X forwarding and pinentry-gtk to enter the password. Also note that for su - to forward the XAUTHORITY ticket to the user session from a root account, you have to create file $HOME/.xauth/export and put into it the su-ed to user name.
Comment 8 Tomas Mraz 2016-06-13 11:00:55 UTC 
The proper workaround is to install screen and run it after the su command and run the gpg --gen-key inside the screen session.
Comment 9 Dylan Scott Grafmyre 2017-06-26 01:23:40 UTC 
I was able to workaround by running gpg2 in a script session

```
$ script /dev/null
$ gpg2 --gen-key
...
```
Comment 10 Ishwar 2018-08-14 18:16:09 UTC 
(In reply to Dylan Scott Grafmyre from comment #9)
> I was able to workaround by running gpg2 in a script session
> 
> ```
> $ script /dev/null
> $ gpg2 --gen-key
> ...
> ```

Thank you for posting the workaround!
Comment 11 Alberto 2020-03-24 09:59:44 UTC 
Dylan Scott Grafmyre, you are my hero! Thanks!
Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.