| 1 | .\" -*-nroff-*- |
| 2 | .TH keyring 5 "5 June 1999" "Straylight/Edgeware" "Catacomb cryptographic library" |
| 3 | .SH NAME |
| 4 | keyring \- description of Catacomb keyring files |
| 5 | .SH DESCRIPTION |
| 6 | Keyring files are line-oriented text files. It is recommended that |
| 7 | programs use only the provided interface for reading and modifying |
| 8 | keyring files for consistency of locking and representation: this |
| 9 | description is provided for the benefit of administrators attempting to |
| 10 | understand or repair keyring files. |
| 11 | .PP |
| 12 | Lines containing only whitespace and lines whose first non-whitespace |
| 13 | character is |
| 14 | .RB ` # ' |
| 15 | are ignored, but are not written back to the file. Thus, the comment |
| 16 | facility is not particularly useful. |
| 17 | .PP |
| 18 | Each remaining line describes a key. Key descriptions consist of |
| 19 | between 4 and six whitespace-separated fields. The final comment field |
| 20 | may contain whitespace characters. The fields are, in order: |
| 21 | .TP |
| 22 | .B type |
| 23 | The key's type string, set when the key was created. |
| 24 | .TP |
| 25 | .B "key data" |
| 26 | The actual key, Base64 encoded, as described in RFC2045. |
| 27 | .TP |
| 28 | .B "expiry time" |
| 29 | The time at which this key expires, represented as an integer, in the |
| 30 | format returned by the |
| 31 | .BR time (2) |
| 32 | system call. |
| 33 | .TP |
| 34 | .B "deletion time" |
| 35 | The time at which this key should be deleted, using the same |
| 36 | representation as the expiry time. The special value 0 signifies that |
| 37 | the key should be deleted on expiry. |
| 38 | .TP |
| 39 | .B attributes |
| 40 | The key's attributes, encoded using the `form-urlencoded' encoding |
| 41 | defined in RFC1866. This field is optional: if it is omitted, the key |
| 42 | has no attributes. Alternatively, if there are no attributes, this |
| 43 | field may be given as a single dash |
| 44 | .RB ` \- '. |
| 45 | .TP |
| 46 | .B comment |
| 47 | The comment field. This field is optional. It may contain whitespace. |
| 48 | It is deliberately not included as an attribute, since the urlencoded |
| 49 | nature of attributes makes them hard to read when perusing a keyring |
| 50 | file. |
| 51 | .PP |
| 52 | It is not envisaged that the file format will change in the future. Any |
| 53 | extensions will be made by defining new attributes. |
| 54 | .SH AUTHOR |
| 55 | Mark Wooding, <mdw@nsict.org> |