How to display gpg key details without importing it

Question

I have a copy of the postgresql apt repository gpg key and would like to view the details of the gpg key as it comes in the file  Is this possible without importing it into a key ring

User · Answer

I seem to be able to get along with simply:

$gpg <path_to_file>

Which outputs like this:

$ gpg /tmp/keys/something.asc 
  pub  1024D/560C6C26 2014-11-26 Something <[email protected]>
  sub  2048g/0C1ACCA6 2014-11-26

The op didn't specify in particular what key info is relevant. This output is all I care about.

User · Answer

To verify and list the fingerprint of the key (without importing it into the keyring first), type

gpg --with-fingerprint <filename>

Edit: on Ubuntu 18.04 (gpg 2.2.4) the fingerprint isn't show with the above command. Use the --with-subkey-fingerprint option instead

gpg --with-subkey-fingerprint <filename>

User · Answer

To get the key IDs  8 bytes  16 hex digits   this is the command which worked for me in GPG 1 4 16  2 1 18 and 2 2 19   gpg --list-packets  lt key asc   awk   1   keyid   print 2     To get some more information  in addition to the key ID    gpg --list-packets  lt key asc   To get even more information   gpg --list-packets -vvv --debug 0x2  lt key asc   The command  gpg --dry-run --import  lt key asc   also works in all 3 versions  but in GPG 1 4 16 it prints only a short  4 bytes  8 hex digits  key ID  so it s less secure to identify keys   Some commands in other answers  e g  gpg --show-keys  gpg --with-fingerprint  gpg --import --import-options show-only  don t work in some of the 3 GPG versions above  thus they are not portable when targeting multiple versions of GPG

User · Answer

When I stumbled up on this answer I was looking for a way to get an output that is easy to parse. For me the option --with-colons did the trick:

$ gpg --with-colons file
sec::4096:1:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA:YYYY-MM-DD::::Name (comment) email
ssb::4096:1:BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB:YYYY-MM-DD::::

Documentation can be found here.

User · Answer

The option --list-packets parses pgp data from a file and outputs its structure - in a very technical way  though  When parsing a public key  you can easily extract the user ids and the key ids of the signatures   Be wary that this command only parses the data format  it does no validation of signatures or similar things

User · Answer

There are several detail levels you can get when looking at OpenPGP key data  a basic summary  a machine-readable output of this summary or a detailed  and very technical  list of the individual OpenPGP packets   Basic Key Information  For a brief peak at an OpenPGP key file  you can simply pass the filename as parameter or pipe in the key data through STDIN  If no command is passed  GnuPG tries to guess what you want to do -- and for key data  this is printing a summary on the key     gpg a4ff2279 asc gpg  WARNING  no command supplied   Trying to guess what you mean     pub   rsa8192 2012-12-25  SC        0D69E11F12BDBA077B3726AB4E1F799AA4FF2279 uid           Jens Erat  born 1988-01-19 in Stuttgart  Germany  uid           Jens Erat  lt jens erat fsfe org gt  uid           Jens Erat  lt jens erat uni-konstanz de gt  uid           Jens Erat  lt jabber jenserat de gt  uid           Jens Erat  lt email jenserat de gt  uid            jpeg image of size 12899  sub   rsa4096 2012-12-26  E   revoked  2014-03-26  sub   rsa4096 2012-12-26  S   revoked  2014-03-26  sub   rsa2048 2013-01-23  S   expires  2023-01-21  sub   rsa2048 2013-01-23  E   expires  2023-01-21  sub   rsa4096 2014-03-26  S   expires  2020-09-03  sub   rsa4096 2014-03-26  E   expires  2020-09-03  sub   rsa4096 2014-11-22  A   revoked  2016-03-01  sub   rsa4096 2016-02-24  A   expires  2020-02-23    By setting --keyid-format 0xlong  long key IDs are printed instead of the insecure short key IDs     gpg a4ff2279 asc                                                                  gpg  WARNING  no command supplied   Trying to guess what you mean     pub   rsa8192 0x4E1F799AA4FF2279 2012-12-25  SC        0D69E11F12BDBA077B3726AB4E1F799AA4FF2279 uid                             Jens Erat  born 1988-01-19 in Stuttgart  Germany  uid                             Jens Erat  lt jens erat fsfe org gt  uid                             Jens Erat  lt jens erat uni-konstanz de gt  uid                             Jens Erat  lt jabber jenserat de gt  uid                             Jens Erat  lt email jenserat de gt  uid                              jpeg image of size 12899  sub   rsa4096 0x0F3ED8E6759A536E 2012-12-26  E   revoked  2014-03-26  sub   rsa4096 0x2D6761A7CC85941A 2012-12-26  S   revoked  2014-03-26  sub   rsa2048 0x9FF7E53ACB4BD3EE 2013-01-23  S   expires  2023-01-21  sub   rsa2048 0x5C88F5D83E2554DF 2013-01-23  E   expires  2023-01-21  sub   rsa4096 0x8E78E44DFB1B55E9 2014-03-26  S   expires  2020-09-03  sub   rsa4096 0xCC73B287A4388025 2014-03-26  E   expires  2020-09-03  sub   rsa4096 0x382D23D4C9773A5C 2014-11-22  A   revoked  2016-03-01  sub   rsa4096 0xFF37A70EDCBB4926 2016-02-24  A   expires  2020-02-23  pub   rsa1024 0x7F60B22EA4FF2279 2014-06-16  SCEA   revoked  2016-08-16    Providing -v or -vv will even add some more information  I prefer printing the package details in this case  though  see below    Machine-Readable Output  GnuPG also has a colon-separated output format  which is easily parsable and has a stable format  The format is documented in GnuPG doc DETAILS file  The option to receive this format is --with-colons     gpg --with-colons a4ff2279 asc gpg  WARNING  no command supplied   Trying to guess what you mean     pub - 8192 1 4E1F799AA4FF2279 1356475387   -  uid         Jens Erat  born 1988-01-19 in Stuttgart  Germany   uid         Jens Erat  lt jens erat fsfe org gt   uid         Jens Erat  lt jens erat uni-konstanz de gt   uid         Jens Erat  lt jabber jenserat de gt   uid         Jens Erat  lt email jenserat de gt   uat         1 12921  sub - 4096 1 0F3ED8E6759A536E 1356517233 1482747633    sub - 4096 1 2D6761A7CC85941A 1356517456 1482747856    sub - 2048 1 9FF7E53ACB4BD3EE 1358985314 1674345314    sub - 2048 1 5C88F5D83E2554DF 1358985467 1674345467    sub - 4096 1 8E78E44DFB1B55E9 1395870592 1599164118    sub - 4096 1 CC73B287A4388025 1395870720 1599164118    sub - 4096 1 382D23D4C9773A5C 1416680427 1479752427    sub - 4096 1 FF37A70EDCBB4926 1456322829 1582466829      Since GnuPG 2 1 23  the gpg  WARNING  no command supplied   Trying to guess what you mean     warning can be omitted by using the --import-options show-only option together with the --import command  this also works without --with-colons  of course      gpg --with-colons --import-options show-only --import a4ff2279  snip    For older versions  the warning message is printed on STDERR  so you could just read STDIN to split apart the key information from the warning   Technical Details  Listing OpenPGP Packets  Without installing any further packages  you can use gpg --list-packets  file  to view information on the OpenPGP packets contained in the file     gpg --list-packets a4ff2279 asc  public key packet      version 4  algo 1  created 1356475387  expires 0     pkey 0    8192 bits      pkey 1    17 bits      keyid  4E1F799AA4FF2279  user ID packet   Jens Erat  born 1988-01-19 in Stuttgart  Germany    signature packet  algo 1  keyid 4E1F799AA4FF2279     version 4  created 1356516623  md5len 0  sigclass 0x13     digest algo 2  begin of digest 18 46     hashed subpkt 27 len 1  key flags  03   snip    The pgpdump  file  tool works similar to gpg --list-packets and provides a similar output  but resolves all those algorithm identifiers to readable representations  It is available for probably all relevant distributions  on Debian derivatives  the package is called pgpdump like the tool itself      pgpdump a4ff2279 asc Old  Public Key Packet tag 6  1037 bytes      Ver 4 - new     Public key creation time - Tue Dec 25 23 43 07 CET 2012     Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign pub 1      RSA n 8192 bits  -         RSA e 17 bits  -     Old  User ID Packet tag 13  49 bytes      User ID - Jens Erat  born 1988-01-19 in Stuttgart  Germany  Old  Signature Packet tag 2  1083 bytes      Ver 4 - new     Sig type - Positive certification of a User ID and Public Key packet 0x13       Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign pub 1      Hash alg - SHA1 hash 2      Hashed Sub  key flags sub 27  1 bytes   snip

User · Answer

pgpdump  https   www lirnberger com tools pgpdump   is a tool that you can use to inspect pgp blocks   It is not user friendly  and fairly technical  however     it parses public or private keys  without warning  it does not modify any keyring  sometimes it is not so clear what gpg does behind the hood  in my experience  it prints all packets  specifically userid s packets which shows the various text data about the keys    pgpdump -p test asc  New  Secret Key Packet tag 5  920 bytes      Ver 4 - new     Public key creation time - Fri May 24 00 33 48 CEST 2019     Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign pub 1      RSA n 2048 bits  -         RSA e 17 bits  -         RSA d 2048 bits  -         RSA p 1024 bits  -         RSA q 1024 bits  -         RSA u 1020 bits  -         Checksum - 49 2f  New  User ID Packet tag 13  18 bytes      User ID - test  test   lt tset gt                          New  Signature Packet tag 2  287 bytes      Ver 4 - new     Sig type - Positive certification of a User ID and Public Key packet 0x13       Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign pub 1      Hash alg - SHA256 hash 8      Hashed Sub  signature creation time sub 2  4 bytes          Time - Fri May 24 00 33 49 CEST 2019     Hashed Sub  issuer key ID sub 16  8 bytes          Key ID - 0x396D5E4A2E92865F     Hashed Sub  key flags sub 27  1 bytes          Flag - This key may be used to certify other keys         Flag - This key may be used to sign data     Hash left 2 bytes - 74 7a      RSA m d mod n 2048 bits  -             - gt  PKCS-1   unfortunately it does not read stdin

User · Answer

You may also use --keyid-format switch to show short or long key ID     gpg2 -n --with-fingerprint --keyid-format short --show-keys  lt filename gt    which outputs like this  example from PostgreSQL CentOS repo key    pub   dsa1024 442DF0F8 2008-01-08  SCA                                                                                 Key fingerprint   68C9 E2B9 1A37 D136 FE74  D176 1F16 D2E1 442D F0F8                                                    honor-keyserver-url uid                    PostgreSQL RPM Building Project  lt pgsqlrpms-hackers pgfoundry org gt                                              When  using --refresh-keys  if the key in question has a preferred keyserver URL  then use that sub   elg2048 D43F1AF8 2008-01-08  E

[gnupg] How to display gpg key details without importing it?

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