Create a Ed25519 GPG key with sub-keys for Git signing

How to create a GPG key with Ed25519 elliptic curve and sub-keys for each of your device to sign your Git commits.
Reading time
15 minutes

Why signing

Why should you even sign your commits you might ask.

GPG output bloat

The output of GPG contains a lot of bloat. For brevity and readability of this article they have been truncated from the following instructions. The truncated messages are the following.

A version and license header appearing at the beginning of every output:

gpg (GnuPG/MacGPG2) 2.2.17; Copyright (C) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

During creation of the keys, GPG will output the following message one or more times:

We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.

Create a new key

First of all we need to create a new basic GPG key. Also, we want to use ECC as it provides better security and smaller key sizes. As the Curve 25519 is still considered experimental in GPG, we have to enter the --expert mode to be able to select it.

The command --full-gen-key tells the program that we want to select everything by hand instead of using defaults.

gpg --expert --full-gen-key

First we are asked what kind of key we want. Here we select 9 as we want to use ECC for signing as well as encryption.

Please select what kind of key you want:
   (1) RSA and RSA (default)
   (2) DSA and Elgamal
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
   (7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
   (8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
   (9) ECC and ECC
  (10) ECC (sign only)
  (11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
  (13) Existing key
Your selection? 9

Now we need to select which ECC curve we want to use. As mentioned before, we would like a key with Curve 25519 so we pick 1.

Please select which elliptic curve you want:
   (1) Curve 25519
   (3) NIST P-256
   (4) NIST P-384
   (5) NIST P-521
   (6) Brainpool P-256
   (7) Brainpool P-384
   (8) Brainpool P-512
   (9) secp256k1
Your selection? 1

GPG keys usually have an expiration time. Of course we can also create a key without any expiration time, although I can only recommend that if you export it to a flash drive or other offline media.

I personally pick 5 years for my keys because it is a good balance between security and convenience of updating the expiration from time to time.

Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
      <n>  = key expires in n days
      <n>w = key expires in n weeks
      <n>m = key expires in n months
      <n>y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 5y
Key expires at Sun Oct 27 09:44:35 2024 JST
Is this correct? (y/N) y

As the last step creating our key, we have to provide our user ID. This is a combination of name, email and an optional comment. As name you should put your full real name but if you really want you can just pick a nickname or anything else. The email should be the same address that you use for committing messages on git. Lastly the comment is completely optional and I personally leave it empty in most cases.

After we filled out everything, we have the chance to update our information again or confirm with o (that’s the letter O, not the number 0).

In this step GPG will ask us to provide a password for the new key to secure it. The password can be left empty, but I strongly recommend to pick a good and strong password.

GnuPG needs to construct a user ID to identify your key.

Real name: Test user
Email address: [email protected]
Comment:
You selected this USER-ID:
    "Test user [email protected]>"

Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? o

After a short moment (ECC key generation is much quicker than for example RSA) the key is generated and GPG prints out some information about our key.

This content provides a ton of information and we can verify our key was created as expected. At this step I will not go into the details of this output. If you are interested in the meaning, you can find plenty of articles.

gpg: key 77ADE9F988183CAE marked as ultimately trusted
gpg: revocation certificate stored as '/.../E84092ACA29DAFD0B8072DC277ADE9F988183CAE.rev'
public and secret key created and signed.

pub   ed25519 2019-10-29 [SC] [expires: 2024-10-27]
      713F3A6119BCB10CB40CC57CA4C47F5C36B4D9A4
uid                      Test user [email protected]>
sub   cv25519 2019-10-29 [E] [expires: 2024-10-27]

With all these steps completed, we have our GPG key created with ECC/Curve 25519 instead of the RSA default. The key can already be used like this for signing with Git and uploaded to GitHub.

As a further security measure it is recommended to add additional subkeys if you have more than one device where you want to use the key.

Add subkeys

Adding subkeys is a good measure to further secure your key. This is especially important when using multiple devices. Consider you have 3 devices, one of it a smartphone, and your key is copied on all of these. Then somebody steals your phone and may get access to its data.

Now your key may be in the hand of a thief and he can impersonate you wherever you use it. You need to revoke your key as soon as possible. Now your identity is safe but you have to create a new key completely from scratch. That means you would have multiple entries on the key servers and need to replace your key on every machine.

With subkeys you don’t have to do this. A subkey belong, as the name already suggests, to your main key but can be shared to different devices individually. The goal is to create a subkey for each device and copy only this key to the device. Then when the device is compromised, we can simply revoke the single subkey but can continue to use the main key and other subkeys.

So lets get started and add some subkeys by using the --edit-key command. Copy the key ID from the previous output and run the following command. Again we use the --expert mode to be able to select Curve 25519.

gpg --expert --edit-key 713F3A6119BCB10CB40CC57CA4C47F5C36B4D9A4

GPG outputs some information about the key and changes into interactive mode. Here we can type help at any time to get a list of available commands.

Secret key is available.

sec  ed25519/A4C47F5C36B4D9A4
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: SC
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  cv25519/2858AB2B62165AD8
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: E
[ultimate] (1). Test user [email protected]>

gpg>

We can add new subkeys with the addkey command, so lets do so.

gpg> addkey

Similar to when we were creating the main key, GPG asks us again what kind of key we want to create. This time we have different options though. Interesting for us are the options 10 to 12. We can create keys for sign only, encrypt only or set our own capabilities.

We want to use this key mainly for commit signing in Git so we pick a sign only key with number 10.

Please select what kind of key you want:
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
   (5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
   (6) RSA (encrypt only)
   (7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
   (8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
  (10) ECC (sign only)
  (11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
  (12) ECC (encrypt only)
  (13) Existing key
Your selection? 10

Next we can pick the curve again and as we want to use Curve 25519 we pick 1 here as well.

Please select which elliptic curve you want:
   (1) Curve 25519
   (3) NIST P-256
   (4) NIST P-384
   (5) NIST P-521
   (6) Brainpool P-256
   (7) Brainpool P-384
   (8) Brainpool P-512
   (9) secp256k1
Your selection? 1

Subkeys can have their own expiry date, independent of the main key. Again, I recommend 5 years for the key for the same reasons as mentioned before. GPG tells us the exact expiration date and we confirm with y.

Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
      <n>  = key expires in n days
      <n>w = key expires in n weeks
      <n>m = key expires in n months
      <n>y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 5y
Key expires at Sun Oct 27 09:49:56 2024 JST
Is this correct? (y/N) y

Lastly we are asked if we really want to create this additional key and confirm with y.

Really create? (y/N) y

Now the subkey is created and added. GPG prints us the current state of our key so we can verify everything went well. The usage: S tells us that this key can only be used for signing.

sec  ed25519/A4C47F5C36B4D9A4
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: SC
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  cv25519/2858AB2B62165AD8
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: E
ssb  ed25519/746FDF7E8D328496
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: S
[ultimate] (1). Test user [email protected]>

gpg>

Before we finish let’s add another key by repeating the steps above. This is to showcase that a later step is working but you can add as many subkeys as you need.

sec  ed25519/A4C47F5C36B4D9A4
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: SC
     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
ssb  cv25519/2858AB2B62165AD8
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: E
ssb  ed25519/746FDF7E8D328496
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: S
ssb  ed25519/D99E5215D40089AC
     created: 2019-10-29  expires: 2024-10-27  usage: S
[ultimate] (1). Test user [email protected]>

Finally we need to save our key with the save command. Until now we only modified the key in memory so we have to persist our changes to disk. If something went wrong and you don’t want to save your changes, you can cancel with the quit command instead.

gpg> save

With all the steps done we updated our key, now including several subkeys. But unfortunately we are not done yet.

Exporting subkeys

After adding subkeys, the next step is to export and distribute them to our devices. Copy the IDs of our keys from the previous instructions. The ID is directly after the key type, for example in ed25519/746FDF7E8D328496 the ID is 746FDF7E8D328496.

The command --export-secret-subkey allows us to export the subkey. Be aware of the ! directly after the ID. This is important to only export the single key. Without it the command would simply export all subkeys of the related main key.

gpg --export-secret-subkey 746FDF7E8D328496! > device_1.gpg

And lets do the same with our 2nd subkey,

gpg --export-secret-subkey D99E5215D40089AC! > device_2.gpg

Import subkeys

After the long journey of creating a new key, adding subkeys and exporting them, we can transfer them to our devices and import them. Importing is rather simple with the --import command.

gpg --import device_1.gpg

And that is all we have to do on our devices to use the subkeys. If you run the --edit-key command here again, you will notice that the key only contains the public main key and a single subkey. In case you published your key to a key server, you can update the key from the key server afterwards. You may see the other subkeys appearing again, but they will contain a # which means the private component is missing, and it can’t be used without.

Setting up Git

After importing our keys, we need to setup Git to always use the right key and sign all messages by default. We can do so by changing the global config file with git config --global.

First we copy the ID of our subkey and set the signing key. The key should differ on setup as we use a different key per device.

git config --global user.signingkey 746FDF7E8D328496

Then we tell Git to always sign all commits.

git config --global commit.gpgsign true

Upload to GitHub (or other hosts)

Most Git hosts like GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea and many others already support signed commits and usually show a badge next to each commit.

Once we start pushing our signed work, without further setup the hosts will show our changes as unverified. The platform simply doesn’t know (yet) about our signature and can’t verify it.

To tell the host about our our key, we need to give it our public key. First we have to export it with the --export command. The --armor flag gives us an easy to copy output as the binary output may contain some non-printable characters which makes it hard for us to copy and paste.

Here we need the ID of our master key.

gpg --armor --export A0757AAC786713298C9D33ED886E3D4DD9756974

The output should look similar to this. Make sure to copy the full message, including the dashes and BEGIN and END parts, really everything.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
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=Vnz2
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Then open the account settings of your host of choice and search for a section labeled GPG Keys or similar. You will find a section where you can add a new key by adding the copied key. Do so and save your changes.

Now you should see your signed commits as verified in the commit history of your hosts web interface.

Updating the GPG key after adding more keys

In case you add more subkeys at a later point in time, you may need to re-upload your public key to your host. The existing keys will still continue to work, but the host doesn’t know yet about your new key, so you have to tell it by overriding the old public key.

Further tips

Quick version

The previously shown commands are all entering into an interactive mode where you have to answer several questions one by one. If you are a more advanced user and or simply want to save some time, GPG offers some quick commands as well. The result is the sample as before.

First we have to create our initial main key. User ID, key type, usage and expiry can all be provided in a single command.

gpg --quick-gen-key "Test user [email protected]>" ed25519 default 5y

Here the output is slightly different. Note that we don’t have an additional encryption subkey as before in the interactive version.

gpg: key 993F4EBDD65F4388 marked as ultimately trusted
gpg: revocation certificate stored as '/.../0A7F74591D07505886BC1D3A993F4EBDD65F4388.rev'
public and secret key created and signed.

pub   ed25519 2019-10-29 [SC] [expires: 2024-10-27]
      0A7F74591D07505886BC1D3A993F4EBDD65F4388
uid                      Test user [email protected]>

Let’s add this key now to get the same results. Again we can provide all options directly in one command and the main key ID is copied from the previous output.

gpg --quick-add-key A0757AAC786713298C9D33ED886E3D4DD9756974 cv25519 default 5y

Lastly we can add our signing subkeys. Repeat this step for as many keys as you want.

gpg --quick-add-key A0757AAC786713298C9D33ED886E3D4DD9756974 ed25519 default 5y

Now our key is ready and we can start exporting, distributing and upload the pubic key.

Trying it out locally

If you don’t have another device at hand but still want to follow all the instructions, you can delete your complete key before importing a subkey. Please be sure to double check the key ID as there is no way back, once you deleted your key.

With the --delete-secret-and-public-key command we can completely remove our key. This will ask for the key’s passphrase several times.

gpg --delete-secret-and-public-key A4C47F5C36B4D9A4

First GPG will ask us (2 times) if we really want to delete our secret key. We confirm with y both times.

sec  ed25519/A4C47F5C36B4D9A4 2019-10-29 Test user [email protected]>

Delete this key from the keyring? (y/N) y
This is a secret key! - really delete? (y/N) y

In the next step it will delete the public key but will ask us beforehand again. Again we confirm with y.

pub  ed25519/A4C47F5C36B4D9A4 2019-10-29 Test user [email protected]>

Delete this key from the keyring? (y/N) y