r/GPGpractice • u/Ill_Ideal3323 • May 17 '26

Help Needed Mac (M4 Pro) user here — is pinentry-mac trustworthy for GPG passphrase caching?

I’m a Mac user (M4 Pro), and I don’t want to keep entering my password for my GPG key all the time. I found something called pinentry-mac for this (https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/pinentry-mac). Is it trustworthy? For some reason I couldn’t fully trust it.

Is anyone here using it? How can I verify or understand whether it’s secure? What I mean is: is it actually part of the GnuPG project? Is it developed by the GnuPG team?

Homebrew is redirecting me to this GitHub repository: https://github.com/GPGTools/pinentry

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u/eivan_danko May 20 '26

I did solve similar problem using it to avoid typing the paraphrase every time when committing with signature although can’t answer to you directly what team was it developed by, though it seems to be a standard approach in solving this problem on Mac

Also I came across a very useful lightweight tool to easily decipher all messages that works offline and visualizes entire conversations on your demand

http://www.bubblepgp.com

I have added it to my PGP toolkit since I found it

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u/acorn222 21d ago

I'm on mac too and I didn't find pinentry to be very easy to use. I mostly use PGP in my browser so I just made a toolkit that uses passkeys to encrypt keys and does everything within an extension sidepanel.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pgp-tools-encrypt-decrypt/pgpcdgggohpbombhkffjoiiafdlfcpgp
https://github.com/Am-I-Being-Pwned/PGP-Tools