Two PGP Keyrings for Package Management in Arch Linux

Source : Link

Both the pacman package manager and the makepkg tool for building packages verify files using PGP signatures. However, these two pieces of software do it using different keyrings. There seems to be a lot of confusion about this and misinformation is spreading at a rapid pace, so I’ll attempt to clarify it here!

Pacman Package File Signature Verification

By default, pacman is set-up to verify every package using a PGP signature. It has its own keychain for this purpose, located at /etc/pacman.d/gnupg/. This keychain is initialized during the Arch Linux install – a root key is created and the Arch Linux master keys are locally signed by the root key. The master keys sign all Arch Developer and Trusted User keys, creating an effective web-of-trust from your pacman root key to each of the packager keys allowing verification of package files.

If you want to allow the installation of package files from a non-official repository, you need to either disable signature verification (don’t do that…), or trust the packagers signing key. To do this you first need to verify their key ID, which should be well publicized. Then you import it into the pacman keyring using “pacman-key --recv-key <KEYID>” and signify that you trust the key by locally signing it with your pamcan root key by running “pacman-key --lsign <KEYID>“.

Makepkg Source File Signature Verification

When building a package, the source files are often (and should be!) signed, with a signature file available for download alongside the source file. This typically has the same name as the source file with the extension .sig or .asc.makepkg will automatically verify the signature if it is downloaded in the sources array. e.g.:

source=(http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libc/${pkgname}-${pkgver}.tar.xz{,.sig})

However, makepkg needs some information to verify the source signature. It will need the public PGP key of the person who signed the source file, and that key to be trusted. The difference here is that you do not trust whoever provided the source file to provide packages for your system (or at least you should not the vast majority of the time), so your user’s keyring is used. To get the key use “gpg --recv-key <KEYID>” and trust it (once suitably verified) using “gpg --lsign <KEYID>“.

If you provide a package to the AUR, it would be a lot of work for everyone to suitably verify a PGP key and locally sign it. To demonstrate that you have verified the key, you can add the following to the PKGBUILD:

validpgpkeys=('F37CDAB708E65EA183FD1AF625EF0A436C2A4AFF') # Carlos O'Donell

Now makepkg will trust that key, even if it is not trusted in the package builder’s PGP keyring. The builder will still need to download the key, but that can be automated in their gpg.conf file.

Hopefully that clarifies the two separate types of PGP signature verification happening in pacman and makepkg and explains why they should be separate… Now can people stop recommending that the pacman keyring is imported into the user’s keyring and vice versa?