Validating signature trust with gpg?

Posted by larsks on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by larsks
Published on 2011-07-22T15:55:49Z Indexed on 2013/06/24 16:25 UTC
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We would like to use gpg signatures to verify some aspects of our system configuration management tools. Additionally, we would like to use a "trust" model where individual sysadmin keys are signed with a master signing key, and then our systems trust that master key (and use the "web of trust" to validate signatures by our sysadmins).

This gives us a lot of flexibility, such as the ability to easily revoke the trust on a key when someone leaves, but we've run into a problem. While the gpg command will tell you if a key is untrusted, it doesn't appear to return an exit code indicating this fact. For example:

# gpg -v < foo.asc
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
gpg: armor header: 
gpg: original file name=''
this is a test
gpg: Signature made Fri 22 Jul 2011 11:34:02 AM EDT using RSA key ID ABCD00B0
gpg: using PGP trust model
gpg: Good signature from "Testing Key <[email protected]>"
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: ABCD 1234 0527 9D0C 3C4A  CAFE BABE DEAD BEEF 00B0
gpg: binary signature, digest algorithm SHA1

The part we care about is this:

gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.

The exit code returned by gpg in this case is 0, despite the trust failure:

# echo $?
0

How do we get gpg to fail in the event that something is signed with an untrusted signature?

I've seen some suggestions that the gpgv command will return a proper exit code, but unfortunately gpgv doesn't know how to fetch keys from keyservers. I guess we can parse the status output (using --status-fd) from gpg, but is there a better way?

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