NAME¶
jetring - maintenance of gpg keyrings using changesets
OVERVIEW¶
jetring is a collection of tools that allow for gpg keyrings to be maintained
using changesets. It was developed with the Debian keyring in mind, and aims
to solve the problem that a gpg keyring is a binary blob that's hard for
multiple people to collaboratively edit.
With jetring, changesets can be submitted, reviewed to see exactly what they
will do, applied, and used to build a keyring. The origin of every change made
to the keyring is available for auditing, and gpg signatures can be used to
further secure things.
OPERATION¶
A jetring directory is used as the "source" that a keyring is built
from. To convert an existing gpg keyring to such a directory, use the
jetring-explode(1) command.
Each change to the gpg keyring is stored in a separate changeset file in the
directory. Changesets can reflect any set of changes to the keyring.
Changesets can also include arbitrary metadata. The
jetring-gen(1)
command can be used to compare two keyrings and generate a changeset from one
to the other.
Changesets are never removed or modified, only new ones added, using the
jetring-accept(1) command.
There's an ordering of the changesets. This ordering is stored in an index file.
The index file is only appended to, to add new changesets.
Changesets can be fully examined to see what change they make before applying
them. The
jetring-review(1) and
jetring-diff(1) commands can be
used for such review.
To create a new keyring, or incrementally update an existing keyring, changesets
are applied in order using the
jetring-build(1) command.
GPG SIGNATURES¶
The index file can optionally be gpg signed (the signature will be stored in
index.gpg); if JETRING_SIGN is set to point to a gpg keyring, then jetring
commands that operate on the jetring directory will always check that the
index file is signed with one of the keys from that keyring. Commands that
modify the index file will update its signature.
A changeset file consists of one or more stanzas, separated by blank lines. The
stanzas are in RFC-822-like format. Each stanza must have an action field,
which specifies which action to take on the keyring, and a data field,
typically a multi-line field, which contains the data to feed to the action.
Supported actions are:
- import
- The data field should be an ascii-armored gpg key block,
that is fed into gpg --import.
- edit-key keyid
- gpg --edit-key is run on the specified key id. The data
field is a script, each line in it is passed in to gpg, the same as if gpg
were being driven interactively. This can be used to make arbitrary
changes to the key.
- delete-key keyid
- The given key is deleted. The data is fed into gpg
--delete-key, and should be "y", since gpg expects that
confirmation to deleting a key.
Other fields can be added as desired to hold metadata about the change. Typical
additional fields include date, changed-by, and comment.
Changesets can be optionally have attached signatures, although such data is not
automatically validated and is mostly useful to record who submitted or signed
off on a given changeset.
AUTHOR¶
Joey Hess, <joey@kitenet.net>.