PGP::Sign version 0.16
          (Create and verify detached PGP signatures for data)

 Copyright 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by Russ Allbery <[email protected]>.
 This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
 under the same terms as Perl itself.


INTRODUCTION

 One important thing to clear up right away:

                    THIS IS NOT A GENERAL PGP MODULE

 For wonderful general PGP modules that will encrypt, decrypt, manage key
 rings, slice, dice, fold, spindle, and mutilate your data, see the PGP
 by-module directory at your local CPAN mirror; hopefully there will be
 one there.  This module sprung out of a need to do one thing and one
 thing only, do it securely, and do it well.  This module creates and
 checks detached signatures for data.  That's it.  If you want to do
 anything else that PGP lets you do, look elsewhere.

 Currently this module only works with text data.  Support for binary
 data is high on the list of features I want to add.

 The original purpose of this module was to factor out common code in a
 News::Article class written by Andrew Gierth that did PGPMoose
 signatures and signed control messages.  It should now be possible to
 reimplement PGPMoose, signcontrol, and pgpverify using this module, and
 the second and parts of the first have already been done.

 So much for the "one thing only" part.  For the "do it securely" part,
 this module uses a pipe to pass the secret key password to PGP, rather
 than a command line flag or an environment variable as seen in other
 modules.  Both of those are subject to snooping by other users; this
 approach isn't.

 For the "do it well" part, the interface to this module takes every form
 of data known to man.  Scalars and arrays are no problem, of course, but
 if you give it a reference to an array, it'll walk the array to avoid
 making a copy of a potentially large data structure.  You can also give
 it an open file (in the form of a glob, a reference to a glob, a
 FileHandle object, an IO::Handle object, or anything derived from
 either) and it'll walk that too.  Or you can give it a reference to a
 scalar if you really want to and it's cool with that.  Or, if you want
 to get really exciting, you can give it a reference to a sub and it'll
 call the sub repeatedly to get more data until the sub returns undef.
 Perfect for walking some complex data structure you don't want to make
 an internal copy of.  And if there's any other interesting data
 structure you want to throw at it, tell me about it, and the next
 version will probably support that too.

 This module supports a wide variety of different versions of PGP, from
 PGP 2.6.2 to PGP 5.0 to PGP 6.5 to the new (and very nice) GnuPG.
 Different implementations of PGP are capable (and not capable) of
 creating and checking various types of signatures; obviously, what this
 module can do is limited by what versions of PGP you have installed.

 See the documentation for all the gory details, which really aren't that
 gory.  At least yet.


REQUIREMENTS

 This module requires a version of PGP that supports PGPPASSFD or some
 other mechanism for handing the passphrase over in a pipe.  2.6.2,
 2.6.3i, 5.0, 6.5, and GnuPG all do.  I can't personally vouch for any
 other version, but I believe ViaCrypt PGP 4.0 may also work (since it's
 largely based on 2.6.2).  This module also requires an operating system
 that's capable of coping with pipes, forking, and passing file
 descriptors through an exec().  If your operating system can't, that's
 considered by this module author to be a bug in your operating system
 and not in this module.

 I've personally tested or received reports of clean tests of this module
 with the following versions of PGP:

       PGP 2.6.2 (US version)
       PGP 2.6.2i
       PGP 5.0 (US Linux freeware version)
       PGP 6.5.2 (US Solaris freeware version)
       GnuPG 0.9.2 (Linux and Solaris)
       GnuPG 1.0.1 (Solaris)

 (Note that GnuPG 0.9.2 will fail test 9 since it doesn't use the same
 type of whitespace munging as PGP.  This has been changed in later
 versions of GnuPG.)  If you successfully use this module with other
 versions of PGP not listed above, please let me know.

 This module requires no other modules besides IPC::Open3 and FileHandle,
 both of which are part of Perl core and have been for some time.  It
 should work with Perl 5.003 or later, although I personally have only
 tested it with Perl 5.004_04 and 5.005_03.


INSTALLATION

 Follow the standard installation procedure for Perl modules, which is to
 type the following commands:

       perl Makefile.PL
       make
       make test
       make install

 You'll probably need to do the last as root unless you're installing in
 your own private modules directory.

 In order for make test to succeed if you're using GnuPG and egd (the
 entropy daemon), you may have to make a symlink from data/entropy to the
 entropy socket in your ~/.gnupg directory.

 When you run make, you will be prompted for the path to the program to
 create signatures and the program to verify signatures.  PGP::Sign will
 try to guess at what you may want to use, preferring GnuPG and then PGP
 5.0.  For GnuPG, PGP 2.6, or PGP 6.5, both paths should point to the
 same program; for PGP 5.0, pgps is the program that generates signatures
 and pgpv is the program that verifies them.  Don't set the signing
 program and the verifying program to mutually incompatible things, or
 you'll get strange results.

 You will also be prompted for what PGP style to default to, since each
 PGP implementation works slightly differently.  This has to be one of
 the following:  "PGP2" for PGP 2.6 workalikes, "PGP5" for PGP 5.0 and
 workalikes, "PGP6" for PGP 6.5 and workalikes, or "GPG" for GnuPG.
 Again, PGP::Sign will try to guess from the name of the binaries you
 chose (and distinguish between PGP2 and PGP6 based on the output of the
 program when run without any arguments).

 If you have multiple versions of PGP installed on your system, you still
 have to pick one to be the default.  You'll be able to switch between
 PGP programs and PGP styles at runtime; see the PGP::Sign documentation
 for details.

 If you want to avoid the prompt for the path to PGP, you can, instead of
 the first line, type:

       perl Makefile.PL PGP=/path/to/pgp

 and then /path/to/pgp will be used as the path to PGP (both signing and
 verification) and you won't be prompted.  When invoked this way,
 Makefile.PL will attempt to figure out what PGP style you're using from
 the name of the binaries.  You can set it specifically with something
 like:

       perl Makefile.PL PGP=/usr/local/bin/gpg PGPSTYLE=GPG

 if you need to.  If the signing program and verifying program are
 different, set PGPS and PGPV instead of just PGP.  For example:

       perl Makefile.PL PGPS=/usr/local/bin/pgps PGPV=/usr/local/bin/pgpv

 If you want to install PGP::Sign in somewhere other than the default
 installation location, you can set PREFIX or LIB on the Makefile.PL
 command line.  See the ExtUtils::MakeMaker documentation for more
 details.


TESTING

 There is a small test suite that uses the files in data to make sure
 that signing and checking of signatures work.  This test suite uses the
 key rings and data in the data subdirectory of the distribution, and
 should work correctly under any of the supported versions of PGP.

 To run the test suite, type:

       make test

 after running make.  Regardless of your PGP style, at least one test
 will be skipped, since PGP::Sign knows how to test RSA signatures (PGP
 2.6, PGP 5.0, and PGP 6.5), DSS version three signatures (PGP 5.0, PGP
 6.5, and GnuPG), and DSS version four signatures (GnuPG only), and no
 one PGP implementation can handle all three (unless your GnuPG
 installation includes RSA support).

 For some reason, the test suite fails the first time it's run with PGP
 6.5 (at least on Solaris), giving error messages about not having enough
 random bits, and then succeeds the second time.  I consider this to be a
 bug in PGP 6.5, as no other version of PGP has this problem.

 Note that different PGP implementations return different things and
 therefore the test suite looks for different things depending on what
 your PGP style is set to.  See the PGP::Sign documentation for an
 extended discussion of issues related to trailing whitespace, and see
 the comments in test.pl for information on exactly what's being tested.

 More tests are welcome, particularly if you find a bug or if they test
 some major functionality of this module not currently covered.


THANKS

 To Andrew Gierth <[email protected]> for the inspiration and
 motivation to write this and the reminder that PGPPASSFD existed, for
 being one of the two people who caught the mistake I made with $? and
 open3(), and for pointing out a missing waitpid() in pgp_verify() that
 was causing zombies.

 To Jon Ribbens <[email protected]> for pointing out that $? isn't
 guaranteed to contain the exit status of something called from open3()
 unless you do a waitpid() for it first.

 To Andrew Ford <[email protected]> for adding PGPPATH support
 and adding a test suite and code in Makefile.PL to search for an
 installed version of PGP.

 To Todd Underwood <[email protected]> for the impetus to get this module
 working under GnuPG and PGP 5.0, and to him and Monte Mitzelfelt
 <[email protected]> for the initial GnuPG implementation that I based mine
 on.

 To Lupe Christoph <[email protected]> for pointing out that Perl
 5.005_03 sets close-on-exec on file handles created by pipe, requiring
 an fcntl() call in PGP::Sign to unset that.

 To J. Porter Clark <[email protected]> for information about
 the socket needed for GnuPG with egd support.

 To David Lawrence <[email protected]> and Greg Rose <[email protected]> for
 signcontrol and PGPMoose respectively, the motivating applications.

 To Phil Zimmermann, because Phil should be listed in the thank you list
 for anything related to PGP, given that he wrote it and went through
 legal hell to make sure we still had it available.

 To Werner Koch <[email protected]> for GnuPG, which is much nicer than
 any other PGP implementation I've worked with and is free to boot, and
 for pointing me at the right sections of RFC 2440 to explain the OpenPGP
 standard on whitespace munging in text signatures.


CONTACTING ME AND CONTRIBUTIONS

 Send any comments, bug reports, feature requests, flames, thank yous,
 offers of vast quantities of money, lutefisk, and large green Martian
 dogs named Ralf to [email protected].  :)

 Please allow at least a month for me to respond to mail regarding this
 module.  I get at *least* 500 mail messages a day, and I'm afraid this
 module is something that I only get a chance to work on once every few
 months.  I do intend to continue to maintain it, however, and I will get
 back to you eventually.

 Contributions are welcome!  I will not have enough time to add
 everything I want to add to this module, but I tend to be sparked into
 bursts of creativity and programming energy when sent new ideas or
 patches, even partial ones.  If you're interested in contributing,
 please read TODO first.

 Enjoy!

--
Russ Allbery <[email protected]>         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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