pgpdump: a PGP packet visualizer

• Kazu Yamamoto kazu@iij.ad.jp
• 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 test/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 from a release tarball:

% ./configure
% make
% su
# make install

To build from Git, run autoreconf -fviW all before running the above commands.

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 test directory. Also, you can visualize your pubring and secring.

Home page

The official home page of pgpdump is:

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

Bugs

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

Testing

To run all of the tests:

% make check

or:

% make
% ./test/test

To run specific tests:

% make check TESTS="test/pub.res test/sig.res"

or:

% make
% ./test/test test/pub.res test/sig.res