Hi, WK@, thanks for your attention to this. Please note up top that this is a bug report about a beta release.

On Fri, 17 Oct 2025 09:33:38 +0200, Werner Koch <[email protected]> wrote:

Further: Authenticode signatures have a timestamp and thus you have assurance when they were issued.

Gpg4win 5.0 is not too far away.

I don’t know if it was clear amidst other discussions on this thread: I reported a real-world cert validation error on a Microsoft platform, of Gpg4win 5 beta. The latest gpg4win-beta package (369) was published 2025-09-05, two months after cert expiry — thus, **the Authenticode timestamp does not help.** Prior discussion of the Authenticode timestamp, which I hope was not misplaced in topic drift:

https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2025-October/067899.html
(I messed up my PGP authentication on the metadata of that post, whoops! msg sig ok. Did anyone notice?)

IMO, a bad Authenticode signature which *actually* fails validation with error on Microsoft OS is a bug in beta-369. Well, beta means to shake out bugs! I respectfully suggest these fixes:

1. A gpg4win-5-beta version bump, with a valid Authenticode sig on new binary packages (and any other recent beta bugfixes).

2. Review gpg4win release engineering procedure to add guardrail check for invalid Authenticode sig. To protect non-beta releases, too, automated regression test should catch the *bad signature* that causes Microsoft platform error on (AFAIK) the gpg4win-5.0.0-beta369.exe binary. Security software should not have any security failures of software supply chain integrity checks.

I’m sorry, I cannot contribute any patch. I can’t even check the Authenticode sig myself. I don’t have any Authenticode stuff on my machine. I do not use Gpg4win! A Microsoft user told me of in-the-wild failure on a Microsoft platform; I pieced together the rest of the puzzle.

I myself can easily verify your PGP dist sig. But this does not help the PGP-newbie Microsoft user, with whom I am communicating remotely/anonymously from my never-Microsoft platform. My machine says:

impurify@sex:~/dl/gpg4win$ gpg --verify gpg4win-5.0.0-beta369.exe.sig 
gpg4win-5.0.0-beta369.exe
gpg: Signature made Fri Sep  5 12:08:09 2025 UTC
gpg:                using EDDSA key 6DAA6E64A76D2840571B4902528897B826403ADA
gpg: Good signature from "Werner Koch (dist signing 2020)"
Primary key fingerprint: 6DAA 6E64 A76D 2840 571B  4902 5288 97B8 2640 3ADA

(I will try to hold topic-drift replies in abeyance until this primary issue is adequately addressed.)

Always,

[email protected]

--
A makeshift way to distribute my current PQ-PGP key:
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/attachments/20250107/4732a382/attachment.key
01A6D81EEAD7EEEC393DEC1401F4894C154E1B8EE32E9059CA5566792A836823

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

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