On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 08:58:18PM -0500, Bob Jonkman wrote:
I'd try to restore an older keyring and try with that. If you get the same results you can always put the current keyring back.
You could also try to install GnuPG 1.x and use that. GnuPG 1.x doesn't have all the command line options that GnuPG 2.x does, but 1.x should still be able to decrypt a file.
There's also a new version, GnuPG 2.1.x which I haven't used yet, but may provide better diagnostics.
There's an unlikely chance that your encrypted file is corrupted in such a manner as to throw signature errors; did you try one of your backed-up files?
Thanks for the suggestions. The particular file is backed up on three other computers daily, and I get the same problem on each of them. Of course, if there were damage to the file, the damaged file would have been backed up. When I get back to Toronto in a few days I'll check a few places where an older version of the file might be. Ditto for the keyring. I have some hopes that I will get hold of a sufficiently old version of the file and of gpg to decrypt it that way. We'll see. I upgraded to the latest testing version under gentoo (not the bleeding-edge version), 2.0.26-r2, but it made no difference to the problem. Haven't yet tried to downgrade GnuPG. One of the things that puzzles me is that the error is "bad session key" -- which at least suggests that the file is okay and the passphrase checks out, but there is something about my current "session" at fault. This seems to happen when people run gpg-agent, but I'm not doing that. No idea what GnuPG thinks a "session" is... perhaps it has a bad key or something cached in its memory? But I've completely rebooted my laptop several times, and the same problem comes up, so that doesn't seem likely. Thanks again! -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-978-3311 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42