[Botan-devel] botan and gpg confusion

[Jack Lloyd]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 10:23:06PM +0100, Philipp Klaus Krause wrote:
> How do botan and gpg interoperate?
> I've compiled and executed the dsa_kgen example.
> When I try to import the generated files into gpg I get
> gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
> gpg: Total number processed: 0
> Is it possible to load keys exported from gpg into botan?

Are you trying to get just the keys, or the certificates/metadata (eg, 
the attached signatures and so forth)?

> What is this strange X.509 public key format, which it seems is
> exclusive to botan and libcryptc++ (a google search for X.509 public key
> format gives only 6 hits, everyone seems to use X.509 certificates).

The public key formats are fairly standard (OpenSSL also supports
them, for example); any implementation of X.509 certificates is also
going to be able to handle X.509-format public keys, though it may not
expose that functionality. 

> What about private keys? I can't find much info about the gpg's export
> file formats, I suppose they're gpg specific, with the exception of PKCS
> #12 maybe, but botan supports only PKCS #8.

Presumably GPG is mostly supporting/using the OpenPGP formats, which
are entirely specific to PGP/GPG. It's certainly possible to translate
or process those, but Botan doesn't have much of anything along those
lines right now.

-Jack