Subject: Re: bug#8474: 23.2; smime feature requests

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:39:45 +0200

(This nine year old bug report has had no attention -- sorry about
that.)

Arik Mitschang <[email-masked]> writes:

> I have two feature requests for the smime package included in gnus
> shipped with emacs. The first is trivial and simply adds the AES
> encryption standard to that which is supported by emacs smime (openssl
> supports these, if there are many versions which don't perhaps adding a
> note the the doc string to check before changing would be appropriate in
> addition to the change). This change is implemented in the first
> attached patch.

I've now applied this to Emacs 28.

> The second is somewhat less trivial, some folks will have there RSA
> private key not encrypted for whatever reason and it can be fairly
> annoying to have to enter a password for such keys each time (and in
> cases where it would not be appropriate to change the password cache
> time, one would have to). Since I found no real easy way to determine if
> a key is encrypted other than to open the file and check every time, I
> added another bit to the smime-keys variable allowing the user to
> specify if that key is clear or not, and added optional args to the
> signing and decryption functions along with a helper function that will
> determine if the key (by email) needs a password or not. This is
> implemented in the second attached patch.

It's been so long since you sent the patch, so I don't know if you're
interested in following up on this or not.  If not -- I totally
understand.

But I'm not quite sure I understand the use case.  Does the patch
auto-decrypt if your private key is without a passphrase?  If so, that
does indeed seem useful.  On the other hand, these days I think
everybody uses a gpg agent, so it's less important whether there's a
passphrase or not these days, and people chose
always-decrypt/ask-before-decrypt independent of whether the private key
has a passphrase or not.

But I may be misinterpreting you here...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no