#540 Timout for gpg-agent related operations like: decrypt a message

[Uwe Kaminski]

I am running a freshly installed Ubuntu 15.10 using GnuPG 2.0.28 and Thunderbird 38.3.0 using Enigmail 1.8.2.

All operations that access the gpg-agent seem to run into a timeout and for this reason they are very slow. This means that signing, decrypting, encrypting take additional ~25 seconds in order to be performed.

One specific example:

1. There is an encrypted email in my inbox and I select these email.
2. The message body is shown as encrypted text block
3. I am waiting ~ 25 seconds
4. I am asked to enter the password for the key used to decrypt the message
5. Entering the password
6. The message is shown in plain text.

This behaviour is exactely the same if I jump to another unencrypted email in my inbox and afterwards back to the encrypted one.

There seems to be a timeout with the gpg-agent because the Enigmail log says for the example above:

Initializing Enigmail service ...
EnigmailAgentPath=/usr/bin/gpg2

enigmail> /usr/bin/gpg2 --version --version --batch --no-tty --charset utf-8 --display-charset utf-8
gpg (GnuPG) 2.0.28
libgcrypt 1.6.3
Copyright (C) 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Home: ~/.gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Pubkey: RSA, RSA, RSA, ELG, DSA
Cipher: IDEA, 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH,
        CAMELLIA128, CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256
Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224
Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2

enigmail> /usr/bin/gpg2 --charset utf-8 --display-charset utf-8 --batch --no-tty --status-fd 2 --max-output 319000 --decrypt --use-agent
enigmail> /usr/bin/gpg2 --charset utf-8 --display-charset utf-8 --batch --no-tty --status-fd 2 --fixed-list-mode --with-colons --list-keys ABCDEFGHIJK12345

[Uwe Kaminski]

I installed language support for German at the whole system and after doing this the delay is gone. I do not have a clue what is the reason for that....

[Ludwig Hügelschäfer]

This seems to be a distribution-specific problem. If you want to contribute, then please post this at a Ubuntu support forum. Thanks :-)

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Sun 2015-11-15 15:19:20 -0500, Uwe Kaminski wrote:

1. There is an encrypted email in my inbox and I select these email.
2. The message body is shown as encrypted text block
3. I am waiting ~ 25 seconds
4. I am asked to enter the password for the key used to decrypt the message
5. Entering the password
6. The message is shown in plain text.

This behaviour is exactely the same if I jump to another unencrypted email in my inbox and afterwards back to the encrypted one.

fwiw, I think this timeout is due to pinentry-gtk waiting on some dbus
accessibility (a11y) service (/org/a11y/bus, maybe?), and timing out
after 250000 milliseconds.

I have been unable to reproduce it myself, but i've seen straces from
users with similar reports.

--dkg