Fedora 38 is out, and unsurprisingly it comes with a lot of shiny, new things. One especially interesting novelty for readers of this blog is that this is the first release of Fedora in which the RPM Package Manager uses Sequoia to verify packages. This blog post is the story of how that came to be.
I’ve just released a new version of sq, our general-purpose
command-line tool for Sequoia PGP, and it’s packed full of exciting,
user-visible changes. In line with our goal of providing great
end-to-end authentication, this release of sq moves from working
exclusively in a stateless manner to including a full PKI, and a local
certificate store. It also adds a new high-level trust management
interface, sq link. sq link builds on the web of trust, but uses
concepts from address book management, which hopefully makes it easier
for end users to understand.
I have recently added the ability to generate Graphviz DOT output to the Sequoia Web of Trust project. This new functionality has been released in version 0.7.0. With it, users can visually inspect an OpenPGP Web of Trust.
This can provide some fascinating insights into one’s own keyring, and the relationship between OpenPGP keys involved with software projects.
Today is the day Sequoia’s StandardPolicy starts rejecting
SHA1-based signatures by default. This change will affect existing
programs based on Sequoia, as the SHA1 deprecation has been committed
to and baked into the code three years ago. Therefore, all programs
using sequoia-openpgp version 0.15 and up will now reject
SHA1-based signatures by default.
We are pleased to announce the first release of the Chameleon, Sequoia’s reimplementation of the GnuPG interface. This is a technology preview, but we encourage developers who integrate GnuPG into their software to see whether it works with the Chameleon.
I did some user testing of sq with five volunteers. This blog post
is a report of what I learned. Good news: everyone did get all the
tasks done successfully and within the one hour I had allocated, with
plenty of time left over. Of course, there were a few things that
could be improved.
I will do some informal user testing of sq. In short, I will watch volunteers use sq to achieve specific tasks that I give them. The goal of this is to find out pain points when using sq: what is easy and straightforward; what is difficult to understand; what is difficult to do. The testing will cover the sq command line tool and its built-in help, but not any other manuals or materials.
The Sequoia command line tool sq has gained support for the sq keyring list and sq wkd url commands.
We are pleased to announce a new release of sq, our command line tool for OpenPGP operations. This release brings some more functionality, as well as some bug fixes. A summary of the user-visible changes from the past four months since the previous release: sq can now add and remove key User IDs. sq can now generate a subkey for authentication. sq now handles malformed certificates in a sq keyring list more gracefully.
The GnuPG command line tool gpg is the most popular
implementation of the OpenPGP specification. The Sequoia PGP
project produces the corresponding sq tool, and that tool is
very much in its early stages. In the long run, we want sq to become
so capable it has a comparable feature set to gpg. This blog post is
a comparison of what the two tools can do.
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