v2.1.13

v2.1.13 is a maintenance release of the legacy 2.1.x series, recommended for everyone who stays on 2.1 (including Qt5 users).

Improvements

• A friendlier key list. Keys can be found by fingerprint in any grouping, even when pasted with spaces, colons, or in a different case. Key trees expand by default, and the signer and recipient pickers stay usable while the key list refreshes.
• Clearer encryption errors. When a key cannot be used for encryption, GpgFrontend now tells you why (revoked, expired, disabled, or without a usable encryption subkey) and names the recipient it concerns.
• Text editor preferences. Choose the editor font family and tab size in the appearance settings. Changes apply without a restart.
• Smaller touches. A confirmation after a successful key export, subkey dates with tooltips, the subkey's own expiry shown when editing a subkey, and better text search in the editor.

Security

• Your files are never half-written. Encryption, decryption, signing, and archive output is written to a hidden temporary file first and only replaces the target once the whole operation has succeeded. A failed operation leaves the original file untouched.
• Unprotected plaintext is withheld. Decrypted content from a message without integrity protection is no longer shown or saved, for symmetric messages as well.
• A missing signer key is a warning, not a failure. If a message decrypts correctly but the signer's public key is not in your keyring, you still get your decrypted text or file.
• Archive extraction hardened against path traversal, symlinks and hard links pointing outside the destination, oversized contents, and setuid bits.
• Secrets are wiped from memory. Passphrases and other sensitive data are erased after use, including in the user interface, and generated passphrases are now evenly distributed.
• Stricter user ID validation for names, comments, and email addresses.

Fixes

• Fixed several crashes: in asynchronous key import, with an empty subkey list, when a key disappears while its details are open, and when a signature reference is missing.
• Fixed hangs on shutdown and restart. gpg-agent is now stopped on exit instead of being restarted, and a canceled startup ends the process directly.
• Unsaved editor content and its line endings are preserved more reliably across shutdown and recovery.
• Key generation dialogs stay open when generation fails, so you do not lose what you entered.
• Invalid key database settings now produce an error instead of failing silently.
• Modules are found again when the AppImage runs extracted (without FUSE).
• Dialog sizes and positions are restored more safely, and the native macOS palette is kept.
• Translations refreshed for all interface changes in this release.

Build

• The Windows release now bundles GnuPG 2.5.21 (up from 2.5.18).
• Official Windows builds are produced on Windows Server 2022 only.

Note

As with 2.1.12, most of these changes were backported from the 2.2.x series. Only bug fixes, security hardening, and user interface improvements are taken. No major new features are planned for 2.1.x; see the 2.2.x series for those.

Full Changelog: v2.1.12...v2.1.13