PGP Clean Room 1.0 Release

2018-08-10

After several months of work, I am proud to announce that my GSoC 2018 project, the PGP/PKI Clean Room, has arrived at a stable (1.0) release!

PGP/PKI Clean Room

PGP is still used heavily by many open source communities, especially Debian. Debian’s web of trust is the last line of defense between a Debian user and a malicious software update. Given the availability of GPG subkeys, the safest thing would be to store one’s private GPG master key offline and use subkeys regularly. However, many do not do this as it can be a complex and arcane process.

The PGP Clean Room simplifies this by allowing a user to safely create and store their master key offline while exporting their subkeys, either to a USB drive for importing on their computer, or to a smartcard, where they can be safely used without ever directly exposing one’s private keys to an Internet-connected computer.

The PGP Clean Room also supports PKI, allowing one to create a Certificate Authority and issue certificates from Certificate Signing Requests.

Screenshots

Main Menu

Progress Bar

Setting up a Smartcard

Usage

You’ll probably want to read the README to understand how to build and use this project.

It contains instructions on how to obtain the latest build, as well as how to verify it, use it and build it from source.

Translators Wanted

The application has gettext support and a partial German translation, but now that strings are final I would love to support more languages than just English! See the PGPCR README to get started, and thank you for your help!

Source Code

pgpcr: This repository contains the source code of the PGP Clean Room application. It allows one to manage PGP and PKI/CA keys, and export PGP subkeys for day-to-day usage.

make-pgp-clean-room: This repository holds all of the configuration required to build a live CD for the PGP Clean Room application. This is the recommended way to run the application and allows for easy offline key pair management. Everything from commit a50e2aae forward was part of GSoC 2018.

Development Log

The project changelog, which was a day-by-day log of my activities, can be found here.

You can find links to all my weekly reports on the project wiki page.

Bugs Filed

Over the course of this project I also filed a few bugs with other projects.

  • Debian #903681, about psf-unifont’s unneeded dependency on bdf2psf.
  • GNUPG T4001, about exposing import and export functions in the GPGME python bindings.
  • GNUPG T4052, about GPG’s inability to guess an algorithm for P-curve signing and authentication keys.

More Screenshots

Generating GPG Key

Generating GPG Signing Subkey

GPG Key Backup

Loading a GPG Key from a Backup

CA Creation

Advanced Menu