14 DAY TRIAL // The GnuPG Project, through Werner Koch, has announced the immediate availability for download of the eight maintenance release of the GnuPG 2.1 software, an open-source, free, and complete implementation of the OpenPGP standard.
According to the release notes, which we have attached at the end of the article for reference, GnuPG 2.1.8 is a bugfix release that repairs a regression that occurred when using EdDSA keys with SSH (Secure Shell), re-implements the ability to send very large keys to key servers, and adds support for exporting secret keys via Assuan.
Furthermore, it is now possible to translate validity strings in key listings, as well as to transmit FAILURE status lines in order to help the GnuPG Made Easy (GPGME) library. Build stamps are no longer used by default, the maximum length of a passphrase has been raised from 100 to 255 bytes, and the internal documentation has been improved.
"The GnuPG Project is pleased to announce the availability of a new release of GnuPG modern: Version 2.1.8," says Werner Koch. "The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is a complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard which is commonly abbreviated as PGP."
Many other issues have been fixed
In addition to the changes mentioned above, GnuPG 2.1.8 no longer links to the libksba library for reducing the dependencies, changes the fallback encoding for broken locale settings from Latin-1 to UTF-8, cleans a big part of the code, and fixes several small issues that have been reported by users since the previous version.
Download the GnuPG 2.1.8 sources right now from Softpedia. Of course, please note that the source package requires you to compile the software by hand before installing it. Thus, we recommend that you check for the new GnuPG version in the default software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution.