3 EasyPG is a GnuPG interface for Emacs. It has two aspects: convenient
4 tools to use GnuPG from Emacs (The EasyPG Assistant), and a fully
5 functional library to interact with GnuPG (The EasyPG Library.)
9 ** GNU Emacs 21.4 or XEmacs 21.4
20 Add the following line to your ~/.emacs
24 Then you can browse your keyring by `M-x epa-list-keys'. In addition,
25 you can do some cryptographic operations on dired.
29 : e (or M-x epa-dired-do-encrypt)
30 (select recipients and click [OK])
34 The EasyPG Library can be used in combination with various MUA (Mail
37 ** CVS version of Gnus
39 CVS version of Gnus has the native EasyPG binding, simply put the
40 following line into your ~/.emacs.
42 (setq mml2015-use 'epg)
44 Other options which affect on the binding are
47 mml2015-encrypt-to-self
48 mml2015-cache-passphrase
49 mml2015-passphrase-cache-expiry
52 NOTE: You need not to install pgg-epg.el in this case.
56 PGG is somewhat outdated PGP library used by old Gnus, MH-E, etc.
58 There is a PGG backend using EasyPG called pgg-epg.el. However,
59 EasyPG API is a superset of PGG, so pgg-epg.el just emulate the old
60 behavior of pgg.el. Major features which PGG lacks are
62 - Key selection interface
63 - Web of trust support
64 - A mechanism to investigate the verify result
65 - S/MIME support using gpgsm
69 SEMI is the MIME library used by Wanderlust, cmail, T-gnus, etc.
71 There is an EasyPG capable SEMI library called EMIKO-EasyPG. It can
72 be downloaded from the same site of the EasyPG distribution point.
76 There are security pitfalls around Emacs.
78 ** Passphrase may leak to a temporary file.
80 The function call-process-region writes data in region to a temporary
81 file. If your PGP library used this function, your passphrases would
82 leak to the filesystem.
84 The EasyPG Library does not use call-process-region to communicate
85 with a gpg subprocess.
87 ** Passphrase may be stolen from a core file.
89 If Emacs crashes and dumps core, Lisp strings in memory are also
90 dumped within the core file. read-passwd function clears passphrase
91 strings by (fillarray string 0) to avoid this risk. However, Emacs
92 performs compaction in gc_sweep phase. If GC happens before fillarray,
93 passphrase strings may be moved elsewhere in memory. Therefore,
94 passphrase caching in elisp is generally a bad idea.
96 The EasyPG Library dares to disable passphrase caching. Fortunately,
97 there is more secure way to cache passphrases - use gpg-agent.