pubring.gpg owned by root

[Jordon Bedwell]

On 07/20/2011 12:14 AM, scar wrote:
> i went to sign an e-mail today, and got this error:
> 
> gpg: can't open `/home/scar/.gnupg/pubring.gpg' gpg: keydb_search
> failed: file open error
> 
> upon inspection of the file, the owner and group had both been changed
> to root.
> 
> any idea what could cause this? hopefully nothing malicious....
> 
> i found a discussion[1] about another user running into this problem
> after upgrading thunderbird and, although that discussion is old and
> referring to upgrading from 1.5 to 2.0, thunderbird here was recently
> upgraded too (to 3.1.11 (ubuntu 10.04)).  i can't recall if enigmail was
> also recently upgraded.....

My suggestion would be to chown it back (and verify the chmod is right)
and then monitor the file, if it doesn't change again until another
upgrade of some kind then it's safe to assume it was an upgrade.  If it
changes again outside of that, then it's time to start digging around.