Why does Software Update and Add/Remove Software claim all packages are untrusted?

Question

About two days ago, Software Update started asking me for me root password in order to update packages. It gives me a dialog box saying:

The software is not from a trusted source. Do not update these packages unless you are sure it is safe to do so.

Naturally, I am concerned. Unfortunately it doesn't give any indication as to exactly what it doesn't like. It's trying to update four packages: ethtool, libical, polkit-qt and ffmpeg-libs. Trying to update any one of these singly also brings up the same dialog box.

I then tried to install yumex since I was told it might help give me more information. Here I discovered Add/Remove Software gives me the same dialog, regardless of the package I choose. yum always wants a root password to perform an update so I'm hesitant to try this.

My question is, what is wrong? Are all my keys out of date due to the new year? I don't know how to use yum to update/verify the keys but everything worked fine last week. All of my repo files have GPG key paths in them. The only non-repository software I've installed recently is massif-visualizer, which I compiled manually.

This is on Fedora 16, x86_64. Apparently there has been no ... interest in updating this dialog box to be more informative.

Answer 1

I think this Bug report is the very problem you ran into, caused by the installation of PackageKit-0.6.21-1.fc16.x86_64:

Bug 771746 - Software Update claims all packages are untrusted 

For reasons unknown, any attempt to use the Software Update or Add/Remove
Software tools since Dec 31st results in an 'Authenticate' dialog. The text is 

"The software is not from a trusted source. Do not update these packages unless
you are sure it is safe to do so."

Clicking on details gives the following:

Action: org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install-untrusted
Vendor: The PackageKit Project

Testing indicates this dialog occurs for *any* package, from all the default
repositories. I do not know why Software Update wants a root password as no
changes to the repository configuration have been changed.

The fix is to upgrade PackageKit (and PackageKit-glib) to PackageKit-0.6.21-2.fc16 or newer. Since you have a 64-bit Fedora system, be sure to install both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of PackageKit and PackageKit-glib.

yum update PackageKit-0.6.21-2.fc16

or simply

yum update PackageKit

You could also download and install the updated rpms for PackageKit and PackageKit-glib (both i686 and x86_64 versions) from this site.