GPG Hangs When Private Keys are Accessed

gitgpgopenpgppgp

I like to sign my git commits with my PGP key, so I was quite alarmed when I went to git commit -S but instead of prompting for my PGP key passphrase, git just started hanging. I haven't made a change to my GPG setup in several months and have made many commits since then with no problem. Additionally, when I attempt to view my private keys with gpg -K, gpg hangs. However, when I run gpg -k to view my public keys, it returns the list like normal. Hopefully someone will have some idea of what is causing this problem and how to fix it.

Best Answer

I came across this exact issue (OSX Sierra 10.12.6, gpg/GnuPG 2.2.5)

Commands that would hang:

gpg -K # --list-secret-keys
gpg -d # --decrypt
gpg --edit-key
gpgconf --kill gpg-agent

My solution was the same as mentioned by John above (ie. kill gpg-agent) as most other methods on how-can-i-restart-gpg-agent would also hang.

# Solution    
pkill -9 gpg-agent

Then for signing git commits I set the tty env as mentioned by cas above and also at gpg-failed-to-sign-commit-object.

export GPG_TTY=$(tty)

Related Solutions

Ssh – gpg-agent instead of ssh-agent

ssh can't open connection to your gpg-agent if you will not give it the way to do so.

When you start your gpg-agent with --enable-ssh-support option, it prints out environmental variables that needs to be available in the shell where from you will be using your ssh. There are few possibilities how to get them:

Stop your gpg-agent and start it once more in like this in the shell where from you are using your ssh (this should be the easiest way to test it):
```
eval $(gpg-agent --daemon --enable-ssh-support --sh)
```
Find the location of authentication socket and set up the environment variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK by hand

Later on, when you will know that it works, you should set up the agent start according to the manual page for gpg-agent(1), so probably in ~/.xsession to let it start automatically.

Ssh – Import the SSH key as GPG sub-key to use for SSH authentication

All that you need:

export GPG_TTY=$(tty)
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$(gpgconf --list-dirs agent-ssh-socket)
ssh-add -c -t 3600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa   # set the cache lifetime as 3600s

Then feel free to remove the files: mv ~/.ssh/id_rsa.* /path/to/backup.

Now you can do an SSH login for testing.

After all, remember to add the Environments to your profile, like .profile or ~/.bashrc.

(Ps:You can find the ssh key(in gpg format) exists in ~/.gnupg/private-keys-v1.d/ and with keygrip as its name, which can be used to be added as a subkey.

Reference:

https://incenp.org/notes/2015/gnupg-for-ssh-authentication.html

https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/Invoking-GPG_002dAGENT.html

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ssh – gpg-agent instead of ssh-agent

Ssh – Import the SSH key as GPG sub-key to use for SSH authentication

Related Question