pinentry window launched by gpg-agent closes prematurely, unable to enter passphrase

[Espen Rønnevik]

Binary package hint: maximus

When receiving an encrypted email in Thunderbird with Enigmail plugin, gpg-agent lauches to get the passphrase for the private key.

1) What you expected to happen:
I expect a window to open where I can enter my passphrase.

2) What actually happens:
The screen starts flickering as the dialog is opened but is immediately closed again. This happens 3 times at which point enigmail gives up and presents an error dialog stating "gpg: public key decryption failed: bad passphrase"

3) The minimal series of steps necessary to make it happen
This happens consistenly on Thunderbird 3.0.4 and Enigmail 1.0.1 while maximus is running, all attempts to decrypt fails.

Disabling Maximus from the startup programs makes the dialog stay open to accept passphrase input and successful decrypting of the email.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: maximus 0.4.14-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat May 1 20:14:41 2010
GConfNonDefault:
 /apps/maximus/exclude_class=[Empathy,Totem,Gwibber,Gnome-language-selector,Gtk-recordMyDesktop,Onboard,Vlc,Seahorse-agent,Gnome-keyring-prompt]
 /apps/maximus/no_maximize=false
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Netbook 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429.4)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_DK:en
 LANG=nb_NO.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: maximus

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe (jeffreyratcliffe)]

Note that, specifically, pinentry is segfaulting:

$ pinentry
OK Your orders please
GETPIN
Segmentation fault

The same happens with pinentry-x11. pinentry-curses doesn't, of course, but I can't get that to play nicely with dpkg-buildpackage :-(

[Martin Webster (martinwebster)]

I've also seen this behaviour.

The solution is quite simple:

1. Open Gnome Terminal and type gconf-editor.
2. Select apps->maximus.
3. Double-click exclude-class key.
4. Click Add and type 'pinentry' followed by OK.

I've tested this solution with Evolution and GPG, e.g. gpg --clearsign.

[Jeffrey Ratcliffe (jeffreyratcliffe)]

On 21 May 2010 18:59, Martin Webster <email address hidden> wrote:
> The solution is quite simple:

Works for me! Thanks for the tip.

Regards

Jeff

[Dirk Heinrichs (dirk-heinrichs)]

Same here. However, I don't see how this is related to this "maximus" package. I see this behaviour no matter from which program I try to perform a decryption operation. I tried all of kmail, thunderbird/enigmail and plain gpg on command line with all variants of pinentry configured in gpg-agent.conf.

[Espen Rønnevik (brightside)]

This happens because "maximus" attempts to maximize the pinentry dialog, which is not designed to be maximized. As a result, pinentry segfaults, you never get to enter you passphrase and gpg-agent fails.

[Philip (rocketman768)]

Agree with Dirk. I am using pinentry-qt, and I don't even have maximus installed.

Also, pinentry does not segfault for me if I do:
$ pinentry
OK Your orders please
GETPIN

What else can be wrong?

[Philip (rocketman768)]

For me, adding the line:
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-qt4

seems to have fixed the problem. I don't know what pinentry program it was using before or why it crashed though.

[gf (gf-interlinks-deactivatedaccount)]

Hello Espen,
Thank you for submitting this bug and reporting a problem with Thunderbird.

You made this bug report in 2010 and there have been several versions of Ubuntu and Thunderbird since then.

Could you confirm that this is no longer a problem and that we can close the ticket?
Or, if it is still a problem, could you run the following (only once):
apport-collect 573195

and upload the updated logs and and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

Thank you again for helping make Ubuntu and Thunderbird better.

G

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for maximus (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]