Re: [Enigmail] Differences between Enigmail and OpenPGP in Thunderbird 78

Eli Schwartz <[email protected]> Wed, 26 Aug 2020 14:53:09 -0400
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.mozilla.enigmail.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 8/26/20 2:10 PM, Christian Riechers wrote:
> On 8/25/20 2:29 AM, Eli Schwartz wrote:
>> On 8/24/20 8:12 PM, Mark wrote:
>>> Am I understanding this correctly, your PGP keys are no longer secured
>>> with their passphrase and instead relies on the global master password
>>> in Thunderbird? Does that not weaken or at least somewhat minimize the
>>> validity of the signatures? There are numerous TB password recovery
>>> programs out there.
>>
>> Fortunately, Thunderbird will have optional support for delegating
>> private key actions (decrypt, sign) to an external GnuPG keyring. This
>> is primarily being advertised in order to support smartcards. However,
>> GnuPG won't care whether the private key is in the keyring directly or
>> used via a smartcard. ;)
>>
>> See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards
> 
> I did follow the instructions in the wiki for using smartcards. I don't
> actually use a smartcard, so the secret key is contained in the GnuPG
> keyring that's stored on disk.
> The good news is, this did work on Linux right away for three different
> private keys.
> Also, I'm using an offline primary key, and Thunderbird indeed
> automatically finds the related sub key.
> 
> The bad news is, on Windows 10 it does not work at all. With TB78.2.0
> all I get is the error 'The secret key that is required to decrypt this
> message is not available' when attempting to open an encrypted message.
> Gpg4Win 3.1.12 is installed, which should also include GPGME.
> 
> The wiki article states:
> "You must ensure that Thunderbird 78 can find GPGME in the system
> library search path."
> 
> Great, but how do I do that on Windows? What does "GPGME" even mean
> here, and what exactly is Thunderbird looking for? Is it an .exe file,
> or a DLL?

On Linux, its primary functionality is /usr/lib/libgpgme.so (in my case,
symlinked to version 11.23.0).

It is a library DLL which provides a wrapper for executing the `gpg`
executable using safe options and parsing the output, because GnuPG
itself only provides an exe, not a library DLL.

> Also, what is the 'system library search path' on Windows? Is it the
> same as the $PATH environment variable?
> 
> I've been searching for more information already, but haven't found
> anything useful for Windows.

I'm not overly familiar with Windows, but I *think* it will search the
PATH environment variable for .dll's though I'm not sure in what order.
Did you try setting the variable to check whether it works?

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Arch Linux Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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