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[Pascal de Bruijn <pmjdebruijn@xxxxxxxx>]

This issue isn't about whether gnome-keyring is useful or not.

But there are indeed many reasons for not wanting to use it for anything
but secret store indeed, some as listed by Dmitri.

The fact that gnome-keyring doesn't implement some of these features is
rather inherent to the process, where either SSH or GPG need to advance,
before GNOME is in a position to follow them. Resulting in natural
"lag". The fact that GNOME Keyring is only a small part of GNOME doesn't
make it any better with regard to prioritization.

The fact that GNOME (Keyring) is a usability focused project is indeed a
valid reason to prefer the real ssh-agent or gpg-agent as they are
security focussed projects and presumably should be more trustworthy.

As for the remark about pkcs10, I'm not sure that actually being used by
anything. The main use-case for it seems to be Firefox/Thunderbird which
use NSS, which doesn't seem to be hooked up to GNOME Keyring's PKCS10
component by default.

Regardless of defaults, if I understand well, the following will revert to the old behavior:
echo manual > /etc/xdg/upstart/gnome-keyring.override

Allowing any user to disable to individual services like so:
echo 'X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false' >> /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-gpg.desktop
echo 'X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false' >> /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop
echo 'X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false' >> /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-pkcs10.desktop

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-keyring in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1387303

Title:
  regression: gnome-keyring components can't be disabled anymore

Status in “gnome-keyring” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  To disable user session gnome-keyring upstart job:

  $ echo manual ~/.config/upstart/gnome-keyring.override

  ======

  
  GNOME Keyring is by default a rather invasive service, which meddles with security sensitive processes invasively. This may or may not 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 simply fails (with 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

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