Comment 0 for bug 1387303

GNOME Keyring is by default a rather invasive service, which meddles with security sensitive processes invasively. This may or may be wise depending on a users situation.

One particular case is GNOME Keyring's gpg-agent implementation, which is incomplete and therefore doesn't support GPG's OpenPGP smartcard support. gpg simple fails (when smartcards) when GNOME Keyring is impersonating gpg-agent...

So to be able to use OpenPGP smartcards on Ubuntu, one needs to disable GNOME Keyring from impersonating gpg-agent, which for quite some time now has been trivial to effectively do:

echo 'X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false' >> /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-gpg.desktop

With GNOME Keyring's recent update (3.10.1-1ubuntu4.1) in Trusty, this seems to have been broken by the addition of:

/usr/share/upstart/sessions/gnome-keyring.conf

So it seems the /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring files are either being ignored, or the started process is supplanted by the process started by the upstart session config.

What is unclear to me is what the upstart session configuration is supposed to achieve? And if it is meant to supplant the xdg/autostart files, those should probably have been removed to prevent them from causing any confusion as to how gnome-keyring is started/managed.

Presuming the upstart session is meant to stay, I would suggest to remove the /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-*.desktop files to prevent confusion as mentioned above. And in my opinion a mechanism should be provided so users can control which gnome-keyring components '--components=pkcs11,secrets,ssh,gpg' are activated using some configuration file in /etc, as files in /usr aren't meant to be user edited.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: gnome-keyring 3.10.1-1ubuntu4.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-39.66-generic 3.13.11.8
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-39-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Wed Oct 29 18:14:57 2014
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-04-07 (205 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Beta amd64 (20140326)
SourcePackage: gnome-keyring
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
mtime.conffile..etc.xdg.autostart.gnome.keyring.gpg.desktop: 2014-04-09T19:49:03.884840