MIGRATE-PUBRING-FROM-CLASSIC-GPG(1) General Commands Manual MIGRATE-PUBRING-FROM-CLASSIC-GPG(1)
NAME
migrate-pubring-from-classic-gpg - Migrate a public keyring from "classic" to "modern"
GnuPG
SYNOPSIS
migrate-pubring-from-classic-gpg [ GPGHOMEDIR | --default ]
DESCRIPTION
migrate-pubring-from-classic-gpg migrates the public keyring in GnuPG home directory
GPGHOMEDIR from the "classic" keyring format (pubring.gpg) to the "modern" keybox format
using GnuPG versions 2.1 or 2.2 (pubring.kbx).
Specifying --default selects the standard GnuPG home directory (looking at $GNUPGHOME
first, and falling back to ~/.gnupg if unset.
OPTIONS
-h, --help, --usage Output a short usage information.
DIAGNOSTICS
The program sends quite a bit of text (perhaps too much) to stderr.
During a migration, the tool backs up several pieces of data in a timestamped subdirectory
of the GPGHOMEDIR.
LIMITATIONS
The keybox format rejects a number of OpenPGP certificates that the "classic" keyring for-
mat used to accept. These filters are defensive, since the certificates rejected are un-
safe -- either cryptographically unsound, or dangerously non-performant. This means that
some migrations may produce warning messages about the migration being incomplete. This
is generally a good thing!
Known limitations:
Flooded certificates
Some OpenPGP certificates have been flooded with bogus certifications as part of an
attack on the SKS keyserver network (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dkg-
openpgp-abuse-resistant-keystore-03#section-2.1).
The keybox format rejects import of any OpenPGP certificate larger than 5MiB. As of
GnuPG 2.2.17, if gpg encounters such a flooded certificate will retry the import while
stripping all third-party certifications (see "self-sigs-only" in gpg(1)).
The typical error message when migrating a keyring with a flooded certificate will be
something like:
error writing keyring 'pubring.kbx': Provided object is too large
OpenPGPv3 public keys (a.k.a. PGP-2 keys)
Modern OpenPGP implementations use so-called "OpenPGP v4" public keys. Older versions
of the public key format have serious known problems. See
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880#section-5.5.2 for more details about and reasons
for v3 key deprecation.
The keybox format skips v3 keys entirely during migration, and GnuPG will produce a
message like:
skipped PGP-2 keys: 1
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
GNUPGHOME Selects the GnuPG home directory when set and --default is given.
GPG The name of the gpg executable (defaults to gpg ).
SEE ALSO
gpg(1)
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 2016 Daniel Kahn Gillmor for the Debian project. Please report bugs via the
Debian BTS.
April 2016 MIGRATE-PUBRING-FROM-CLASSIC-GPG(1)
Generated by $Id: phpMan.php,v 4.55 2007/09/05 04:42:51 chedong Exp $ Author: Che Dong
On Apache
Under GNU General Public License
2025-11-21 18:07 @216.73.216.164 CrawledBy Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)