How to solve “The following packages cannot be authenticated”

Debian, , ,

Users of Debian’s testing or unstable distributions may be noticing messages from apt saying things like:

WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
  foo bar baz
Install these packages without verification [y/N]?

I noticed today that google doesn’t turn up good hits for the fix. The fix is really simple:

apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
apt-get update

That’s it. You now have secure packages from Debian. Nice, eh?

35 thoughts on “How to solve “The following packages cannot be authenticated””

  1. Are you sure? The third Google hit for “apt the following packages could not be authenticated” turned up this as the third hit: http://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt

    Reply

    John Goerzen Reply:
    June 15th, 2006 at 10:17 pm

    My search term was:

    apt-get “packages could not be authenticated”

    (With that message in quotes, just like I’ve typed it)

    Indeed, the Wiki page doesn’t contain the relevant error message.

    However, that looks like a very informative page. I’m glad you sent the link — hopefully if anyone finds this page with Google, they can follow it to the wiki. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to add the warning message to the wiki page.

    Reply

    Anonymous Reply:
    September 26th, 2006 at 7:16 am

    Perhaps because the error message is “cannot be authenticated”, not “could not be authenticated”?

    Reply

  6. Thank you!!! It took several wrong google hits before I found your page. In most of the pages I saw the person was just ignoring it and saying Yes anyway! I am very glad you posted an easy fix! Works great!! Thanks again!

    Reply

  8. open /etc/apt/apt.conf and add this line
    APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated 1 ;

    Reply

    Daniel Kahn Gillmor Reply:
    January 9th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

    Please don’t allow unauthenticated packages. that defeats the purpose of signed apt repositories entirely.

    This is a feature a long time in coming, and it’s a good one in today’s untrustworthy network. disabling it is a bad idea.

    Reply

    Anonymous Reply:
    February 17th, 2007 at 4:23 pm

    But it’s fundamentally broken – you have to upgrade the keys before upgrading from the archive, and the keys are frequently out of date.. eg. from today:

    # apt-get install debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring
    Reading package lists… Done
    Building dependency tree… Done
    debian-keyring is already the newest version.
    debian-archive-keyring is already the newest version.
    0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 146 not upgraded.

    # apt-get upgrade
    Reading package lists… Done
    Building dependency tree… Done
    The following packages will be upgraded:
    adduser apt apt-utils base-files bash bsdmainutils bsdutils busybox
    console-common console-data coreutils cron dash debconf debconf-i18n
    …
    WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
    base-files debianutils bash bsdutils libc6 libc6-xen tzdata libsepol1
    libselinux1 coreutils dpkg e2fslibs e2fsprogs gzip hostname libdb4.3
    libpam-runtime libpam0g libpam-modules login mount ncurses-bin perl-modules

    The keys are out of date for about 80% of the downloaded packages, including important ones like libc6 – basically all that implied security does nothing because you *must* allow unsigned installs to be able to upgrade.

    Reply

    Progfou Reply:
    May 13th, 2007 at 11:45 am

    You have to “apt-get update” before “apt-get upgrade” !

    When “apt-get instal …” tells you have the last version installed, it’s from its own knowledge of what the last version is. And this “knowledge” has to be updated using “apt-get update”.

    Yaroslav Halchenko Reply:
    May 15th, 2007 at 5:18 pm

    If by mistake you typed
    etch updates/main updates/contrib updates/non-free
    instead of
    etch/updates main contrib non-free
    you will get ‘The following packages cannot be authenticated!’ because apt will failed to fetch Release.gpg

  9. If this doesn’t work for you, try this command instead:

    apt-key update

    Reply

    Ian Campbell Reply:
    February 20th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    I have now tried all the above and had no luck. I have a fresh install of Etch using the latest weekly release. apt-get update shows:
    GPG error: http://security.debian.org etch/updates Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG A70DAF536070D3A1 Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch)
    I tried apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
    That said I had the latest version.
    apt-key update told me it had processed 5 and 5 were unchanged.
    In desperation I added

    APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated 1 ;
    to my /etc/apt/apt.conf but it still has the gpg error when I run apt-get update.

    Any further ideas would be gratefully received. I am totally out of them.

    Reply

  15. If you’ve disabled authentication in apt[itude] settings, you’ll likewise get this error even if authentication is otherwise possible/working (makes a certain degree of sense; a kind of reminder that authentication isn’t “functional”, but it would be better if it simply said “WARNING: authentication disabled”).

    Regardless, to “fix” this, you need to search for auth and trust in /etc/apt. You can fetch a list of files with auth or trust keywords in them using the command:
    grep -iE ‘auth|trust’ -rl /etc/apt/

    Check the files for proper settings.

    I install all my computers using FAI, and FAI sets this by default (unless you tweak it so it doesn’t). Presumably, this is to prevent install problems with badly implemented local debian repositories. Our repositories are properly implemented (even our custom repository), so we keep auth enabled.

    I don’t know if this is the case with Debian, or just Ubuntu, but the fix is the same in any case.

    Reply

  20. I had to update the keyring and tell it to install the unverified keyring package. Then everything worked. I could not find a solution that didn’t require the installation of at least one unverified package.

    Reply

  23. This did not happen in previousnreleases. A major change like this, that brings thousands of users like crazy thinking “why is Linux becoming so fond of labyrinthine solutions to simple questions”, should prompt useful practical info to the user.

    Reply

  24. When I run “apt-get install debian-archive-keyring” I get that error itself,

    “WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
    debian-archive-keyring”

    What now?

    Reply

    jgoerzen Reply:
    November 20th, 2013 at 12:37 pm

    Add –allow-unauthenticated to apt-get

    Reply

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