Re: Emacs Cloud

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sat, 01 Feb 2014 21:21:06 -0800 Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote: 

LI> Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>> 
>>> Look at `auth-source-epa-make-gpg-token' and
>>> `auth-source-epa-extract-gpg-token'.
>> 
>> Hm.  What's the role of the "secret" in those functions?

LI> And the cloud password should probably be saved in .authinfo, so it
LI> should be fed into the epg functions somehow.  But it seems to want to
LI> prompt for the password...

GnuPG 1.x can be automated so it doesn't ask for the passphrase (it can
pass through Emacs).  With 2.x that's intentionally disabled and you
have to use the daemon, which makes it impossible to supply the
passphrase externally.  See the docs for
`epa-file-cache-passphrase-for-symmetric-encryption' which Ueno-san
updated recently.

See
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2013-10/msg00156.html
and http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/163708 for more
background.

I wrote a large patch to provide ciphers and encryption in Emacs
natively, hoping to avoid the GnuPG issues, but Stefan rejected it
because he wants to move in the FFI direction, so he wants to avoid
tight C bindings to GnuTLS or libnettle/libhogweed.  I plan to work on
this after the freeze so assume there will be something in the Emacs
trunk in 2014 that will do native encryption without prompting you for a
passphrase.

Ted