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[[meta title="Modified GnuTLS 2.4.x available"]]

The MonkeySphere project is now making available a patched version of GnuTLS version 2.4.x, which enhances the utility of the monkeysphere package by enabling it to read authentication subkeys emitted by GnuPG under certain circumstances.

You can track this package in debian lenny by adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://monkeysphere.info/debian experimental gnutls
deb-src http://monkeysphere.info/debian experimental gnutls

Or you can patch and build the packages yourself with the patches and scripts provided in the MonkeySphere git repo.

The only modification needed simply enables the library to parse a GNU extension to the String-to-key (S2K) mechanism as laid out in RFC 4880.

The specific S2K extension supported is known as gnu-dummy, and it simply allows a "secret" key block to be written without storing any of the secret key material. This is used by GnuPG on the primary key when the --export-secret-subkeys argument is given.

You can read notes about the GNU S2K extensions in DETAILS from GnuPG, which you can fetch this way:

svn co svn://cvs.gnupg.org/gnupg/trunk/doc
less doc/DETAILS

A version of this patch was first proposed on gnutls-dev, and looks like it will be adopted upstream in the GnuTLS 2.6.x series, at which point these packages will be unnecessary.

Until that time, these packages are provided to tide over users of monkeysphere on debian lenny (or compatible systems) who want to be able to hand off the authentication-capable OpenPGP subkeys in their GnuPG keyring to their SSH agent.