EasyPG Assistant User’s Manual: Caching Passphrases

4 Caching Passphrases

Typing passphrases is an irritating task if you frequently open and close the same file. GnuPG and EasyPG Assistant provide mechanisms to remember your passphrases. However, the configuration is a bit confusing since it depends on your GnuPG installation (GnuPG version 1 or GnuPG version 2), encryption method (symmetric or public key), and whether or not you want to use gpg-agent. Here are some questions:

Do you use GnuPG version 2 instead of GnuPG version 1?
Do you use symmetric encryption rather than public key encryption?
Do you want to use gpg-agent?

Here are configurations depending on your answers:

1	2	3	Configuration
Yes	Yes	Yes	Set up gpg-agent.
Yes	Yes	No	You can’t, without gpg-agent.
Yes	No	Yes	Set up gpg-agent.
Yes	No	No	You can’t, without gpg-agent.
No	Yes	Yes	Set up elisp passphrase cache.
No	Yes	No	Set up elisp passphrase cache.
No	No	Yes	Set up gpg-agent.
No	No	No	You can’t, without gpg-agent.

To set up gpg-agent, follow the instruction in GnuPG manual. see (gnupg)Invoking GPG-AGENT.

To set up elisp passphrase cache, set epa-file-cache-passphrase-for-symmetric-encryption. See Encrypting/decrypting gpg files.