gpg: WARNING: unsafe ownership on configuration file

mikieboy · 12-15-2008, 05:21 PM

Upon opening a console as root I get the following message:

Quote:

gpg: WARNING: unsafe ownership on configuration file '/home/myusername/.gnupg/gpg.conf'

The permissions for this file are set to:

Owner Read Write

Group Forbidden

Others Forbidden

My question is; why is this considered unsafe and what should the permissions for this file be?

gilead · 12-15-2008, 05:27 PM

If I read your post correctly, gpg.conf is 0600 which should be fine. What are the permissions on your ~/.gnupg directory? Mine are set as follows:

Code:

$ ls -ld ~/.gnupg
drwx------ 2 steve steve 4096 2008-12-14 05:25 /home/steve/.gnupg
$ ls -l ~/.gnupg
total 44
-rw------- 1 steve steve 9029 2007-07-01 07:12 gpg.conf
-rw------- 1 steve steve 4298 2008-05-05 06:08 pubring.gpg
-rw------- 1 steve steve  600 2008-11-20 10:39 random_seed
-rw------- 1 steve steve 1975 2007-10-30 05:52 secring.gpg
-rw------- 1 steve steve 1280 2008-05-05 06:08 trustdb.gpg

mikieboy · 12-15-2008, 06:09 PM

Thanks for the reply Steve. Here's the code:

Quote:

~]$ ls -ld ~/.gnupg
drwx------ 2 mike mike 4096 2008-12-16 00:05 /home/mike/.gnupg/
ls -l ~/.gnupg
total 16
-rw------- 1 mike mike 9152 2008-11-07 20:10 gpg.conf
-rw------- 1 mike mike 0 2008-11-07 20:10 pubring.gpg
-rw------- 1 mike mike 0 2008-11-07 20:10 secring.gpg
-rw------- 1 mike mike 40 2008-11-07 20:10 trustdb.gpg

gilead · 12-15-2008, 07:04 PM

Well, you can't get more restrictive without stopping your own access

By any chance, were you running gpg as a different user (root, for example)? From what I could find on google, running as a different user is the most common cause of that message.