pgpdump: a PGP packet visualizer

• Kazu Yamamoto [email protected]
• August 16, 2010

Overview

pgpdump is a PGP packet visualizer which displays the packet format of OpenPGP (RFC 4880) and PGP version 2 (RFC 1991).

Here is an example:

% pgpdump data/sig1
Old: Marker Packet(tag 10)(3 bytes)
	String - ...
New: One-Pass Signature Packet(tag 4)(13 bytes)
	New version(3)
	Sig type - Signature of a binary document(0x00).
	Hash alg - SHA1(hash 2)
	Pub alg - DSA Digital Signature Algorithm(pub 17)
	Key ID - 0xA79778E247B63037
	Next packet - other than one pass signature
New: Signature Packet(tag 2)(63 bytes)
	Ver 3 - old
	Hash material(5 bytes):
		Sig type - Signature of a binary document(0x00).
		Creation time - Fri Nov 27 22:35:02 JST 1998
	Key ID - 0xA79778E247B63037
	Pub alg - DSA Digital Signature Algorithm(pub 17)
	Hash alg - SHA1(hash 2)
	Hash left 2 bytes - 8f 82
	DSA r(160 bits) - ...
	DSA s(157 bits) - ...
		-> hash(DSA q bits)

Installation

Take the following steps to install pgpdump.

% ./configure
% make
% su
# make install

Binaries are available for Mac OS X via Homebrew:

% brew install pgpdump

Usage

To know how to use pgpdump, type pgpdump -h.

Some examples are stored in the data directory. Also, you can visualize your pubring and secring.

Home page

The official home page of pgpdump is:

• http://www.mew.org/~kazu/proj/pgpdump/

Bugs

• pgpdump assumes that a compressed packet continues until the end of the specified file.

Testing

The test program is written in Haskell. I recommend to install Haskell Platform if you want to test. After that, please install necessary libraries:

% cabal install test-framework-hunit

Now you can execute the test program:

% cd data
% runghc test.hs