gpg: public key decryption failed: No pinentry

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Abbott · Post by **Abbott** » Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:47 am

I updated my laptop on Saturday and now I am having problems with pinentry. If I try to use gpg, I get the error in the Subject:

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aquarius% gpg -d ~/.password-store/gentoo.org/Abbott.gpg 
gpg: encrypted with 4096-bit RSA key, ID XXXXXXX, created yyyy-mm-dd
      "xxxxx (gpg2 key for pass) <xxxxx@gmail.com>"
gpg: public key decryption failed: No pinentry
gpg: decryption failed: No secret key
aquarius%

I can see that pinentry-gnome3 is installed in /usr/bin/ and selected with eselect, I can run pinentry and get "OK Pleased to meet you", and I have tried the solutions listed in other threads I found searching the forums here and here. What is wrong with pinentry?

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Tue Feb 23, 2021 3:07 am

Is "gpg: encrypted with 4096-bit RSA key" what you are expecting. I don't use a key. I encrypt with AES256 and don't see anything about a key.

For troubleshooting pinentry, try switching to another interface, curses or tty.

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Tue Feb 23, 2021 3:15 am

You may want to doublecheck that the pinentry symlink is really set how you intend.

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$ ls /usr/bin/pine* -l
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     15 Feb 25  2019 /usr/bin/pinentry -> pinentry-curses*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  68944 Jan 25 13:34 /usr/bin/pinentry-curses*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  81520 Jan 25 13:34 /usr/bin/pinentry-gnome3*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 123408 Jan 25 13:34 /usr/bin/pinentry-qt*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     11 Jan 25 13:34 /usr/bin/pinentry-qt5 -> pinentry-qt*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  64616 Jan 25 13:34 /usr/bin/pinentry-tty*

VTimofeenko · Post by **VTimofeenko** » Tue Feb 23, 2021 4:09 am

Double-check that the pinentry specified in gpg-agent.conf is one of the installed ones. TK pinentry was recently dropped.

Is dbus actually running? Can you echo $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS in the same shell where gpg fails?

Also, ".password-store" hints at usage of app-admin/pass. Did you use the default keyring when initializing the password store? You can override GPG_HOME when creating the password store.

Abbott · Post by **Abbott** » Tue Feb 23, 2021 5:35 am

VTimofeenko wrote:Double-check that the pinentry specified in gpg-agent.conf is one of the installed ones. TK pinentry was recently dropped.

This was my problem. My ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf had

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pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2

which must have been removed in my last update and --depclean. Changing it to /usr/bin/pinentry-gnome3 has fixed everything. Thank you for the help