I’m very happy and proud to announce the first alpha release of PGPainless!

PGPainless 0.0.1-alpha1 is the first non-snapshot release and is available from maven central. It was an interesting experience to go through the process of creating a release and I’m looking forward to have many more releases in the future 🙂

The current release contains a workaround for the bug I described in an earlier blog post. The issue was, that bouncycastle wouldn’t mark the public sub keys of a secret key ring as sub keys, which results in loss of keys if the user tries to create a public key ring from the exported public keys. My workaround fixes the issue by iterating through all sub keys of an existing key ring and converting the key packages of subkeys to subkey packages. The code is also available as a gist.

Ironically I had some issues related to OpenPGP during the release process. Releases to maven central have to be signed with an OpenPGP key, so I created a dedicated signing key pair using GnuPG, which I wanted to put into a separate GPG key box. After creating the key, I exported it using

gpg --armor --export-secret-keys [key-id] > pgpainless-singing-key.asc

imported it into a dedicated key box using

gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring pgpainless.gpg --import pgpainless-signing-key.asc

and deleted the key from my old key box, as well as the .asc-file. But when I tried to sign my release, I got the error, that a secret key would be needed. After checking the key box, I noticed, that only a public key was present.

Unfortunately that key had already been published to the key servers and I have no way to revoke it, due to lack of a secret key. I have no idea, what exactly happened or how it could happen, but its too late to recover the key.

Edit: I found my error: Importing a secret key is only possible with the flag `–allow-secret-key-import`, eg

gpg --import --allow-secret-key-import key.asc

So in the end I had to create a new OpenPGP key, which I now carefully backed up on a freshly bought USB stick which will be locked away for the event that I lose the copy on my work station. Better safe than sorry.

Happy Hacking!