[Announce] GnuPG 2.4.0 released (silver anniversary)

Werner Koch wk at gnupg.org
Tue Dec 20 10:46:59 CET 2022 

Hello!

Exactly 25 years ago the very first release of GnuPG was published.  We
are pleased to take this opportunity to announce the availability of a
new stable GnuPG release: version 2.4.0.

This release has a few new features and the binary releases come with an
updated Libksba to fix another vulnerability related to CVE-2022-3515.


What is GnuPG
=============

The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG, GPG) is a complete and free implementation
of the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards.

GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign data and communication, features a
versatile key management system as well as access modules for public key
directories.  GnuPG itself is a command line tool with features for easy
integration with other applications.  The separate library GPGME provides
a uniform API to use the GnuPG engine by software written in common
programming languages.  A wealth of frontend applications and libraries
making use of GnuPG are available.  As an universal crypto engine GnuPG
provides support for S/MIME and Secure Shell in addition to OpenPGP.

GnuPG is Free Software (meaning that it respects your freedom).  It can
be freely used, modified and distributed under the terms of the GNU
General Public License.

Three different series of GnuPG are actively maintained:

- Version 2.4 is the current stable version with a lot of new features
  compared to 2.2.  This announcement is about the latest release of
  this series; the previous release was 2.3.8.

- Version 2.2 is our LTS (long term support) version and guaranteed to
  be maintained at least until the end of 2024. Only a small subset of
  features from 2.4 has been back-ported to this series.  See
  https://gnupg.org/download/index.html#end-of-life

- Version 1.4 is only maintained to allow decryption of very old data
  which is, for security reasons, not anymore possible with other GnuPG
  versions.  Please use 1.4 only for this purpose.


Noteworthy changes in version 2.4.0
===================================

  * The key database daemon is now a fully supported feature.  Keys are
    stored in a SQLite database to make key lookups much faster.  Enable
    it by adding "use-keyboxd" o common.conf.  See also the README file.

  * gpg: New command --quick-update-pref.  [rGd40d23b233]

  * gpg: New list-options show-pref and show-pref-verbose.
    [rG811cfa34cb]

  * gpg: New option --list-filter to restrict key listings like
      gpg -k --list-filter 'select=revoked-f && sub/algostr=ed25519'
    [rG1324dc3490]

  * gpg: New --export-filter export-revocs.  [rGc985b52e71]

  * gpg: Also import stray revocation certificates.  [rG7aaedfb107]

  * gpg: Add a notation to encryption subkeys in de-vs mode.  [T6279]

  * gpg: Improve signature verification speed by a factor of more than
    four.  Double detached signing speed.  [T5826]

  * gpg: Allow only OCB for AEAD encryption.  [rG5a2cef801d]

  * gpg: Fix trusted introducer for mbox only user-ids.  [T6238]

  * gpg: Report an error via status-fd for receiving a key from the
    agent.  [T5151]

  * gpg: Make --require-compliance work without the --status-fd
    option.  [rG2aacd843ad]

  * gpg: Fix verification of cleartext signatures with overlong lines.
    [T6272]

  * agent: Fix import of protected OpenPGP v5 keys.  [T6294]

  * gpgsm: Change the default cipher algorithm from AES128 to AES256.
    Also announce support for this in signatures.  [rG2d8ac55d26]

  * gpgsm: Always use the chain validation model if the root-CA
    requests this.  [rG7fa1d3cc82]

  * gpgsm: Print OCSP revocation date and reason in cert listings.
    [rGb6abaed2b5]

  * agent: Support Win32-OpenSSH emulation by gpg-agent.  [T3883]

  * scd: Support the Telesec Signature Card v2.0.  [T6252]

  * scd: Redact --debug cardio output of a VERIFY APDU.  [T5085]

  * scd: Skip deleted pkcs#15 records in CARDOS 5.  [rG061efac03f]

  * dirmngr: Fix build with no LDAP support.  [T6239]

  * dirmngr: Fix verification of ECDSA signed CRLs.  [rG868dabb402]

  * wkd: New option --add-revocs for gpg-wks-client.  [rGc3f9f2d497]

  * wkd: Ignore expired user-ids in gpg-wks-client.  [T6292]

  * card: New commands "gpg" and "gpgsm".  [rG9c4691c73e]

  Release-info: https://dev.gnupg.org/T6303


Getting the Software
====================

Please follow the instructions found at <https://gnupg.org/download/> or
read on:

GnuPG may be downloaded from one of the GnuPG mirror sites or direct
from its primary FTP server.  The list of mirrors can be found at
<https://gnupg.org/download/mirrors.html>.  Note that GnuPG is not
available at ftp.gnu.org.

The GnuPG source code compressed using BZIP2 and its OpenPGP signature
are available here:

 https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2 (7487k)
 https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2.sig

An installer for Windows without any graphical frontend except for a
very minimal Pinentry tool is available here:

 https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/binary/gnupg-w32-2.4.0_20221216.exe (4816k)
 https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/binary/gnupg-w32-2.4.0_20221216.exe.sig

The source used to build this Windows installer can be found in the same
directory with a ".tar.xz" suffix.

A link to GnuPG Desktop®, an AppImage for Linux, featuring this version
of GnuPG along with the advanced graphical user interface Kleopatra is
available from the download page:

 https://gnupg.org/download/index.html#binary

A new release of Gpg4win (version 4.1.0) including this version of GnuPG
is available at

 https://gpg4win.org



Checking the Integrity
======================

In order to check that the version of GnuPG which you are going to
install is an original and unmodified one, you can do it in one of
the following ways:

 * If you already have a version of GnuPG installed, you can simply
   verify the supplied signature.  For example to verify the signature
   of the file gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2 you would use this command:

     gpg --verify gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2.sig gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2

   This checks whether the signature file matches the source file.
   You should see a message indicating that the signature is good and
   made by one or more of the release signing keys.  Make sure that
   this is a valid key, either by matching the shown fingerprint
   against a trustworthy list of valid release signing keys or by
   checking that the key has been signed by trustworthy other keys.
   See the end of this mail for information on the signing keys.

 * If you are not able to use an existing version of GnuPG, you have
   to verify the SHA-1 checksum.  On Unix systems the command to do
   this is either "sha1sum" or "shasum".  Assuming you downloaded the
   file gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2, you run the command like this:

     sha1sum gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2

   and check that the output matches the next line:

63dde155a8df0d5e1987efa5fc17438beca83ac1  gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2
f8b5aaf759fa311e60d34823be342d7e15d1e752  gnupg-w32-2.4.0_20221216.tar.xz
5195ff17de15ffd8629bfd0f0b5dd2b2774295f2  gnupg-w32-2.4.0_20221216.exe


Internationalization
====================

This version of GnuPG has support for 26 languages with Chinese
(traditional and simplified), Czech, French, German, Italian,
Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
being almost completely translated.


Documentation and Support
=========================

The file gnupg.info has the complete reference manual of the system.
Separate man pages are included as well but they miss some of the
details available only in the manual.  The manual is also available
online at

  https://gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/

or can be downloaded as PDF at

  https://gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg.pdf

You may also want to search the GnuPG mailing list archives or ask on
the gnupg-users mailing list for advise on how to solve problems.  Most
of the new features are around for several years and thus enough public
experience is available.  https://wiki.gnupg.org has user contributed
information around GnuPG and relate software.

In case of build problems specific to this release please first check
https://dev.gnupg.org/T6303 for updated information.

Please consult the archive of the gnupg-users mailing list before
reporting a bug: https://gnupg.org/documentation/mailing-lists.html.
We suggest to send bug reports for a new release to this list in favor
of filing a bug at https://bugs.gnupg.org.  If you need commercial
support go to https://gnupg.com or https://gnupg.org/service.html.

If you are a developer and you need a certain feature for your project,
please do not hesitate to bring it to the gnupg-devel mailing list for
discussion.


Thanks
======

Since 2001 maintenance and development of GnuPG is done by g10 Code GmbH
and has mostly been financed by donations.  Three full-time employed
developers as well as two contractors exclusively work on GnuPG and
closely related software like Libgcrypt, GPGME and Gpg4win.

Fortunately, and this is still not common with free software, we have
established a way of financing the development while keeping all our
software free and freely available for everyone.  Our model is similar
to the way RedHat manages RHEL and Fedora: Except for the actual binary
of the MSI installer for Windows and client specific configuration
files, all the software is available under the GNU GPL and other Open
Source licenses.  Thus customers may even build and distribute their own
version of the software as long as they do not use our trademarks
GnuPG Desktop® or GnuPG VS-Desktop®.

We like to thank all the nice people who are helping the GnuPG project,
be it testing, coding, translating, suggesting, auditing, administering
the servers, spreading the word, answering questions on the mailing
lists, or helped with donations.

*Thank you all*

   Your GnuPG hackers


p.s.
This is an announcement only mailing list.  Please send replies only to
the gnupg-users at gnupg.org mailing list.

List of Release Signing Keys:
To guarantee that a downloaded GnuPG version has not been tampered by
malicious entities we provide signature files for all tarballs and
binary versions.  The keys are also signed by the long term keys of
their respective owners.  Current releases are signed by one or more
of these four keys:

  rsa3072 2017-03-17 [expires: 2027-03-15]
  5B80 C575 4298 F0CB 55D8  ED6A BCEF 7E29 4B09 2E28
  Andre Heinecke (Release Signing Key)

  ed25519 2020-08-24 [expires: 2030-06-30]
  6DAA 6E64 A76D 2840 571B  4902 5288 97B8 2640 3ADA
  Werner Koch (dist signing 2020)

  ed25519 2021-05-19 [expires: 2027-04-04]
  AC8E 115B F73E 2D8D 47FA  9908 E98E 9B2D 19C6 C8BD
  Niibe Yutaka (GnuPG Release Key)

  brainpoolP256r1 2021-10-15 [expires: 2029-12-31]
  02F3 8DFF 731F F97C B039  A1DA 549E 695E 905B A208
  GnuPG.com (Release Signing Key 2021)

The keys are available at https://gnupg.org/signature_key.html and
in any recently released GnuPG tarball in the file g10/distsigkey.gpg .
Note that this mail has been signed by a different key.


--
The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that
refuse military service.             - A. Einstein
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