[pacman-dev] trustdb locking issues and snippets from the apt changelog

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 11:25:52PM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
> On 23/04/11 09:32, Dan McGee wrote:
> >Allan and I today, and Denis in the past, noticed some issues with
> >having a shared public key database and locking that gpg wants to do
> >when reading from it. Here is an interesting bit from the apt
> >changelog:
> >
> >apt (0.6.2) experimental; urgency=low
> >   * Provide apt-key with a secret keyring and a trustdb, even though we
> >     would never use them, because it blows up if it doesn't have them
> >
> >>From what I gather, they don't use the trustdb for the reasons we are
> >seeing; instead it looks like they have another keyring named
> >"trusted.gpg" and go forth with the assumption that everything in
> >there is to be trusted.
> >
> 
> Looking into this, I believe that we are hitting an entirely
> separate issue.  The reason for a lack of trustdb in the Debian case
> appears to be more to do with keyring management that anything else.
> 
> The main issue here is that gpg(me) creates a lock file in the
> keyrings home directory whenever it uses a keyring.  Our keyring
> directory only has write permissions for the root user and thus when
> pacman is not being run as root (such as the "pacman -Qip <pkg>"
> case), it can not create a lock file.
> 
> We can work around this by making the /etc/pacman.d/gnupg directory
> have 777 permissions.  The {pubring,secring,trustdb},gpg files will
> still have only root write permissions so I guess this is safe as
> long as those files are created as part of the pacman package
> itself... Also, unless I am missing something even if other files
> are added in that directory by a user, they should not affect gpg.
> Still... 777 permissions on that directory sounds scary.

Eh? Giving a directory "777" permissions still allows arbitrary users to
delete and subsequently re-create files with write permissions. So this
might be a bad idea, here.

> 
> Anyway, doing this makes the signature validation with -Qip work for
> non-root users (using Dan's gpg branch WIP patches).
> 
> Note that GPG itself has an option not to do locking (with a big
> warning about that being bad...), and I thought maybe we could do
> that for the non-root usage case, but it looks like gpgme can not do
> that.
> 
> Allan