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EasyPG is an all-in-one GnuPG interface for Emacs. It consists of two parts: EasyPG Assistant and EasyPG Library.

EasyPG Assistant is a set of convenient tools to use GnuPG from Emacs. EasyPG Library is a sort of an elisp port of GPGME, a wrapper library which provides API to access some of the GnuPG functions.

Requirements

• GNU Emacs 21.4, XEmacs 21.4, or later
  NOTE: EasyPG is included in Emacs 23. You don't need to install EasyPG separately.
• GnuPG 1.4.3 or later (earlier versions are supported but not recommended)

Features

EasyPG Assistant provides the following features:

• Keyring browser.
• Cryptographic operations on regions/files.
• Automatic encryption of *.gpg files.
• Integration into dired-mode and mail-mode.

EasyPG Library provides the following features:

• The API covers functions of GnuPG as GPGME.
• S/MIME support using gpgsm.
• Designed to avoid potential security pitfalls around Emacs.

Download

Current version is epg-0.0.16.tar.gz (PGP signature)

Past releases are in http://sourceforge.jp/projects/epg/files/.

Supplemental tools

Supplemental tools are also in http://sourceforge.jp/projects/epg/files/

• EMIKO-EasyPG
  A fork of SEMI. SEMI is used by some mail/news readers such as Wanderlust. PGP functions in EMIKO-EasyPG are implemented using EasyPG Library.

Security

There are security pitfalls around Emacs.

Passphrases may leak to temporary files

The function call-process-region writes data in region to a temporary file. If your PGP library used this function, your passphrases would leak to the filesystem.

EasyPG Library does not use call-process-region to communicate with a gpg subprocess.

Passphrases may be stolen from core files

If Emacs crashes and dumps core, Lisp strings in memory are also dumped within the core file. read-passwd function clears passphrase strings by (fillarray string 0) to avoid this risk. However, Emacs performs compaction in gc_sweep phase. If GC happens before fillarray, passphrase strings may be moved elsewhere in memory. Therefore, passphrase caching in elisp is generally a bad idea.

EasyPG Library dares to disable passphrase caching. Fortunately, there is more secure way to cache passphrases - use gpg-agent.

Resources

• sourceforge.jp project page