GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 551042
Seahorse does not recognize clearsign-signed signatures
Last modified: 2020-06-06 08:52:28 UTC
Seahorse apparently doesn't recognize clearsigned or attached signatures and only creates and recognizes detached .sig files. If I attempt to open a file made with the command "gpg --clearsign file" (output: file.asc), seahorse tells me: "Couldn't decrypt file: file.asc. No data". If I try to verify (seahorse-tool -v file), I get the message Couldn't verify file: file.asc. No valid signatures found." Same thing with a file created with "gpg -s file" (output: file.gpg). It seems to me that seahorse should offer more or less the same underlying functionality as gnupg. I often have to go to the command line to do things like this that could easily be done through a nautilus context menu. This bug was reported on Launchpad: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/seahorse/+bug/266878
I had a quick look at this. In tool/seahorse-tool.c:verify_start(), the code directly prompts the user for the original material to verify. Unfortunately, I can't see an easy way to ask GPGME if the data we are looking at is a cleartext signature or a detached signature. In the former case, we could avoid prompting a file and call gpgme_op_verify_start() a bit differently.
There is no easy way in GPGME, see: https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2013-September/047710.html One way to solve it would be to read the begining of the file to look for "----- BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE -----\n". Not ideal but should be good enough.
seahorse-plugins is not under active development anymore: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/257 It had its last code changes many years ago: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/seahorse-plugins/-/commits/master Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.