On May 10th, I attended my first ever Rust conference, RustNL 2023. I reached there the night before. My talk was the 3rd one in the morning.

The title of my talk was Using Rust to write Python modules, and my main plan was to inform developers in the crowd to think about python developers as their API/library users. I demoed Tumpa to showcase what can be achieved to help the final end users.

The next 2 talks after mine also had Python in the theme. You should check out all the talks from the conference.

I also managed to meet Mara Bos and get a copy of the book signed. Thank you so much.

I found the conference very tightly organized. The venue being on top of a library and centrally located was also very useful. The funniest incident was to find milk in the lunch menu, that was a first for me.

I also managed to meet some friends whom I only knew from Internet and met other Fedora friends after around 8 years.

I am hoping to be able to participate next year too.

I am happy to announce Tumpa 0.10.0 release. Tumpa is a desktop application which allows you to create OpenPGP keys and also allows uploading them to Yubikeys with a user friendly GUI. With Tumpa, all you need is a few form inputs and few clicks, and done! No more wrangling and breaking your head with command line interface.

This version is a complete rewrite of the initial version I released around 2 years ago. With the help from Elio and his excellent team, we have a new design. Thank you OTF for providing the funding for the work.

Saptak & I decided that the code is ready to be consumed. There are still things to work on, including the UI flows. In the coming months we are going to add more features to the application to make it super useful for advanced users too.

You can create Cv25519 or RSA4096 keys via the "Generate Key" button. You can upload any key to an attached Yubikey, but remember that to use a Cv25519 key, you will need Yubikey 5.

Installation

For Linux we have an AppImage and for Apple M1/M2 devices we have a dmg. You can download them from the release page. Remember to have a look at the user guide, specially because you need to have pcscd service running on Linux.

Technologies used

This project works because we have Johnnycanencrypt , a Python module written in Rust to do OpenPGP operations (including Smartcard operations). Which in turn uses Sequoia Project for the rust library to create/manipulate OpenPGP keys.

The UI is made via QML, using PySide6. This also shows that we can have decent looking desktop applications in Python.

The AppImage and Apple dmg files are available because of briefcase project from BeeWare team.

Give feedback

Since the focus of Tumpa is on making the use of OpenPGP with smart cards user friendly and intuitive, we need a lot of feedback from the user. So, if you find issues and have other feedback to improve the application, feel free to submit [issues])(https://github.com/tumpaproject/tumpa/issues). We are also available in #tumpa channel on IRC on libera.chat server. Feel free to ping the IRC nicknames saptaks or kushal.

At Sunet, we have heavy OpenPGP usage. But, every time a new employee joins, it takes hours (and sometime days for some remote folks) to have their Yubikey + OpenPGP setup ready.

Tugpgp is a small application built with these specific requirements for creating OpenPGP keys & uploading to Yubikeys as required in Sunet. The requirements are the following:

• It will create RSA 4096 Key
• There will be a primacy key with Signing & Certification capability.
• There will be an encryption and one authentication subkey.
• All keys have 1 year expiry date.
• During the process the secret key will not be written to the disk.
• Encryption & signing has touch policy fixed in the Yubikey (it can not be changed).
• Authentication has touch policy on (means it can be turned off by the user).
• The OTP application in the Yubikey will be disabled at the end.

We have an Apple Silicon dmg and AppImage (for Ubuntu 20.04 onwards) in the release page. This is my first ever AppImage build, the application still needs pcscd running on the host system. I tested it on Debian 11, Fedora 37 with Yubikey 4 & Yubikey 5.

Oh, there is also a specific command line argument if you really want to save the private key :) But, you will have to find it yourself :).

If you are looking for the generic all purpose application which will allow everyone of us to deal with OpenPGP keys and Yubikeys, then you should check the upcoming release of Tumpa, we have a complete redesign done there (after proper user research done by professionals).

I just now released v0.13.0 of my johnnycanencrypt project. It is a Python module written in Rust, which provides OpenPGP functionality including allows usage of Yubikey 4/5 as smartcards. From 0.12.0 it is now licensed as LGPL-3.0-or-later.

Major updates in this release (and in the previous one are):

• Adds enable_otp_usb in rjce.
• Adds disable_otp_usb in rjce.
• Changed license to LGPL-3.0-or-later
• We can now disable OTP for both YubiKey4/5 #131.

For many folks disabling the OTP application in the Yubikey is must, otherwise we all saw random bytes dropping on the shell/document/chat thanks to a touch to the key. I tested the code in both Yubikey 4 and 5. I hope this will work well in the field.