GnuPG is a large C codebase and CVEs are readily found simply because of poor testing, poor abstractions, etc. C codebases are also very expensive to review for

GnuPG is a large C codebase and CVEs are readily found simply because of poor testing, poor abstractions, etc. C codebases are also very expensive to review for things like memory safety. As just one example I filed CVE-2018-9234 myself which allowed me to violate key usage restrictions which is pretty fundamental and just did not have a test. Much of the core development team of GnuPG left to work on the Sequoia Rust rewrite which is IMO already much better tested than GnuPG for the features that have parity. Also, it is rust, so memory safety you mostly get for free. They even went as far as to implement three different backends for crypto primitives to easily test they all behave the same way. https://tests.sequoia-pgp.org/ https://tests.sequoia-pgp.org/ Honestly once Sequioa finishes smartcard support and chameleon (gpg cli emulator), then GnuPG should be deprecated IMO.