Nitrokey App conflict with gpg / Pro not responding to GnuPG after getting TOTP code

Nitrokeys
1

I am running an Nitrokey Pro 2 on Ubuntu 18.04 (Linux 5.0.0). When the Nitrokey App is in the system tray, GPG can no longer use the key. When it tries to, the Nitrokey App keeps messaging that the Nitrokey has dissapeared or been reconnected. Somehow gpg and Nitrokey App seem to conflict.

Is this a known problem and is there maybe some kind of workaround for it?

Thanks

2

Hi!

Thank you for the report. I think I have not heard about this one before. These should not influence each other directly (because of using different interfaces), unless something has changed in the OS design.

  • Could you tell which GnuPG version do you use?
  • What are the Nitrokey App and Nitrokey Pro versions? I presume v1.4 and 0.10, but want to confirm.
  • Is your OS up to date?
3

I made a little video demonstrating the issue. Unfortunately it’s become a little bit chaotic, because the behavior is not reproducible. So I sometimes got surprised what actually happened :slight_smile:

Nitrokey App version is 1.2.1, Firmware version it says 0.10

EDIT: In the meantime I upgraded to Nitrokey App 1.4.0 from the ubuntu ppa. Behavior is about the same as shown in the video.

As long as I don’t launch the Nitrokey App the device is working smoothly with gpg. I’ve been using it for hours without any issue.

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4

Just in case someone of your dev team is on #36c3, I would be happy to do a debug session there :slight_smile:

5

We will be there! Perhaps we should make some meeting, announced beforehand on our social channels.

Your movie report is very detailed (thank you!) and I recognized some of the issues. These are scheduled to be fixed in the Nitrokey App next month, in the v1.5 release (some intermediate betas should be released too to shorten the waiting time). Until then you might like to use the nitrocli project.

cc: @jan

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6

FWIW, there is a known incompatibility with GPG: https://github.com/Nitrokey/libnitrokey/issues/137

I don’t know if it’s the same problem.

7

@mueller-daniel
Yes, I believe this is the exact cause of the problem, thank you for linking.

@johmue
In the linked issue there is a workaround for resuming GnuPG work by clearing its assumed smart card state at [1], however I do not remember whether the OTP will provide new code again. Will surely look into that next month.

[1] https://github.com/Nitrokey/libnitrokey/issues/137#issuecomment-511894360

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