5

At work we handle the transfer of small bits of sensitive data with GPG, usually posted on a secure internal website.

Until Firefox 4 was released, we used FireGPG for inline decryption; however the IPC libraries that it relied upon were no longer present in FF4, rendering it unusable. With the launch of Firefox 5, FireGPG will no longer install.

Currently I'm manually pasting the GPG blocks into a text file, then using the Nautilus context-menu plugin or the command line to decrypt the contents of the file. When we're handling a large amount of these small files throughout the day this starts to become a real chore.

I've looked around but can't seem to find much information on useful GPG clients in Ubuntu. A client that allowed me to paste in a GPG block and instantly decrypt it, and also paste in plaintext and easily encrypt it for multiple recipients would be ideal.

So my question is does this exist? I can't seem to find anything about this with obvious searches on Google, so hopefully someone here can help, or offer an alternative workflow.

4 Answers 4

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Just type gpg --decrypt in the terminal, paste your code and press CTRL-D. You should then see the decrypted result.

1
  • I imagine this works but I can't test it right now. I'll check later and accept this answer if it does work. May have to write some kind of small tray-app for our non-technical members. Jun 25, 2011 at 14:23
1

Here is a Python wrapper I wrote that will work on any version of linux(Providing it has nano/pico which most do):

http://pastie.org/2797070

0

Use:

gpg --output [decrypted file] --decrypt [encrypted file]

So you could make a shell script (bash) or similar that decrypts every file you put in a directory:

#!/bin/bash
mkdir decrypted
for i in * do
    if test -f "$i" then
       gpg --output $i --decrypt "decrypted/$i"
    fi
done

Untested, but theoretically this or something similar would work. Perl or Python would also be good alternatives to the shell.

3
  • Thanks for the answer, however we don't deal with files but with GPG blocks; in a similar manner to an encrypted email. As such as the file encryption isn't very useful, as it can't easily be pasted in plain text. I'm looking for something similar in functionality to FireGPG's text editor, essentially. Jun 24, 2011 at 11:27
  • Sorry, not sure then. I think FireGPG development has been discontinued anyway, so your Firefox issues won't be resolved.You could make a script that pipes e-mail output into files for decryption. But I'm not sure 100% on that or if that's a suitable approach for you.
    – SammySP
    Jun 24, 2011 at 11:32
  • You're correct, FireGPG has been discontinued and there isn't much interest in the issues, so it's unlikely to be fixed. Jun 24, 2011 at 11:38
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In case this question doesn't get answered (perhaps this functionality just doesn't exist now, although that seems hard to believe) the command line can be used to produce an ASCII Armor (.asc) file containing the GPG ciphertext block.

gpg  --armor --recipient [Recipient ID] --encrypt [File to Encrypt] --output [Output File].asc

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