PGP4PINE
A PGP Implementation Using Pine Filters

The following instructions are geared toward the UNIX implementation of PGP v2.6.2. These instructions assume that you already have PGP installed on your system and have created your PGP public and secret keyring. (If you do not yet have PGP on your system and haven't yet created your PGP public and secret keyrings, please refer to the MIT PGP Home Page and/or the PGP man page and pgp -h help file as appropriate.)

Another mail user agent called Mutt) comes with PGP operability standard. Special note: you will need to get the "International" version of Mutt in order to utilize Mutt's PGP plug-in features. Export laws of the United States prohibit even having code stubs for drop-in cryptographic support, thus the U.S. version of Mutt does not have PGP support built in.

For users of Elm, I'm personally unaware of any PGP plug-in for said mailer, but I would imagine that the following directions for Pine implementation could be readily adapted for Elm.

These instructions can be readily adapted to suit the command-line sequences as required by PGP v5.x for UNIX (as I've previously done on Slackware Linux). However, I'll go over the basics here and will later add the PGP v5.x implementation if I get enough requests.

The instructions provided here are in the following format:

• Instruction/Explanation
• Important Note
• command-line sequence

How to Implement PGP with Pine:

1. Start in your home directory.
2. cd .pgp
3. D1=`which pgp`
   (Note that the above are backticks and not apostrophes. Further, the PGP binary should be in your PATH statement for the above to work properly.)
4. ln -s $D1 encrypt
5. ln -s $D1 pgpsign
   (If you do an ls -al of the .pgp directory, the contents should look something like the following.)

   ---

   drwx------   3 user group   512 Oct 10 10:10 .
   drwx--x--x   9 user group  1536 Oct 10 10:10 ..
   lrwxrwxrwx   1 user group    18 Oct 10 10:10 encrypt -> /usr/local/bin/pgp
   lrwxrwxrwx   1 user group    18 Oct 10 10:10 pgpsign -> /usr/local/bin/pgp
   -rw-------   1 user group  5860 Oct 10 10:10 pubring.pgp
   -rw-------   1 user group   408 Oct 10 10:10 randseed.bin
   -rw-------   1 user group  1617 Oct 10 10:10 secring.pgp

   ---

6. cd ..
7. pine
8. Perform the following tasks in Pine:

   Select Setup and Config.

   

   Locate "compose-send-offers-first-filter" and Set that option on.

   

   Locate "display-filters" and enter the following:

   _BEGINNING("-----BEGIN PGP MES")_ /usr/local/bin/pgp,
_BEGINNING("-----BEGIN PGP PUB")_ /usr/local/bin/pgp -ka _TMPFILE_

   

   Locate "sending-filters" and enter the following:

   ~/.pgp/pgpsign -fast,
~/.pgp/encrypt -feast _RECIPIENTS_

   

9. Exit and Save the Config changes.
10. As a test, compose a message to yourself.

    

    When you hit Ctrl+X to send your message, you will be presented with the filter for pgpsign. You can select this filter by hitting 'y', or you can do Ctrl+N to go to the next filter (encrypt). You can also hit Ctrl+N again to elect to send the message unfiltered (with no PGP signature and no encryption).

11. On selecting either pgpsign or encrypt, Pine will invoke PGP and request your secret key passphrase. If you do not provide your passphrase, Pine will not send your message.

    

12. Upon successfully entering your passphrase, PGP will sign/encrypt your message (based on which filter you selected) and send your mail. As the following shows, this message was PGP signed.

    

That's all there is to it. Enjoy your PGP Pine plug-in.

About the author
Jay D. Dyson is an independent security consultant specializing in network and host security services and serves as a Senior Security Engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in Pasadena, California. He has been involved with computers for over 20 years and has been a system administrator for over 15 years on various platforms.