Copy-Paste disabled by Pinentry for gnupg


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Thread: Copy-Paste disabled by Pinentry for gnupg

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Posts
    28

    Copy-Paste disabled by Pinentry for gnupg

    I am running Kubuntu 13.10. I have the latest Thunderbird and Enigmail installed.

    I'm trying to create a keypair and revocation cert. My issue is that my passphrases are 160+ character long randomly-generated strings. Typing this in manually is out of the question. It's too long and too easy to make a mistake, at which point I will have to completely start over and try again. The sensible thing to do would be to copy-paste the passphrase (stored in a secured file vault). But I can't because Pinentry grabs the keyboard away from all applications and disables all copy & paste operations. Supposedly this can be disabled by putting the string "no-grab" in the gpg-agent.conf file stored in /user/bin/.gnupg. Well, that file didn't exist so I created it, and put that string in. I also made sure gpg.conf had the "use-agent" option. Still, pinentry grabs the keyboard and blocks pasting. I'm not sure what else to do.

    Any ideas?

    Thanks in advance.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2014
    Posts
    6
    I don't really know Kubuntu, but I know that thre are different implementations of pinentry. There are "fixes" for some of them, but you must be conscious that there was an important reason to block copy and paste for strong passwords. You may want to check the following two discussions:
    gossamer-threads.com/lists/gnupg/gpa/49757
    bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pinentry/+bug/326132

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2014
    Posts
    1
    Same problem here. I'm trying to invoke gpg via a shell script, and this pinentry-ncurses thingy complains about missing S.gpg-agent and unknown LC_TYPE, so i have to fire up X (!) to use the gtk interface.

    Ironically, the ncurses interface works when gpg is invoked directly and not from a shell script.

    So far I didn't find any solution to disable this completely useless feature, just found some hints that this is required now. On my BSD machines same thing, i went with the old gnupg version but this can't be a solution. I honestly don't know why a tool like gpg needs some stupid dependency like this.

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