Re: why pgp sucks

[Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>]

> if i use a command like
> 
> 	pgp filename

The problem is that you are using the wrong command....

> it will automatically figure out the right thing to do with the file.  if
> it's encrypted, and i have the key, it will attempt to decrypt it.  if it
> contains keys, it will ask if i want to add them to my keyring.  if it's
> signed, it checks the signature.

This is the correct behavior of "pgp filename".  If you want other
behavior, you should tell PGP how you want it to behave.

> if i'm trying to write a program to automatically process incoming mail (for
> instance, to see if it's encrypted with a specific key), i certainly don't
> want to have the possibility of people being able to add garbage to my
> keyring just by mailing it to me.

A very noble effort, combining PGP with mailers.  Btw: When you run
"pgp filename" and filename contains public keys, it will ask you
before it adds them to your keyring!

You can use "pgp -d" to force it to do a decryption (although you
cannot specify which key to use for the decryption; it will choose any
of the keys on your secret keyring).

> is there a way of using pgp in a diagnostic mode, to just inform me of what
> the file contains (is it signed and/or encrypted, from who and to whom?),
> without processing it, and without interaction, and without messing around
> with the keyring?  has anyone written some scripts to do this kind of thing?

Well, I'm not exactly sure what you want.  You can give PGP no
password and it will tell you to whom a message is encrypted.  You can
call pgp -ka and it will _only_ add keys (and complain if you are
given anything else).  There is no way to ask PGP "what kind of
message is this"; that is sort of what the ASCII ARMOR header is for.

> or should i just wait until some of the groups working on the other
> encryption software get it out?

No, you should, at this point, consider working around the problems in
the monolithic PGP, until a more modular library is available, to
which multiple end programs can be built to do multiple little tasks,
as Matt explained.

Does this help?

-derek