this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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PGP = Pretty Good Privacy. It’s both a company and the original product released by Phil Zimmerman that has since been mostly replaced by Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG).
These products create paired secret keys using the ciphers of your choice. You make the public key available to the public and keep the private key for yourself.
Then, you can either sign or encrypt some content with your private key, and anyone with your public key can validate that it was you who signed or encrypted the file.
You can also use someone else’s public key to encrypt a file, and then only the holder of the paired private key can decrypt it. And they can use your public key to validate that it was you who encrypted it.
Email addresses are optional, but can be embedded in the keypair. This means that someone else can verify that that address is linked with the identity of that keyholder, which assists in getting encrypted content to the right recipient, validates any signed/encrypted email sent from that address, and provides a memorable link to the public key’s owner.
So the email and name will be plaintext in the public key/signatures?
Ok, just strange how the key generator insists on specifying them. Encryption usually doesn't like extra metadata.
Its about trusting the data you're decrypting actually came from who you think it came from.
So the data is signed with your public key, and your public key is published so people can verify the other stuff you publish. Your email is there just so people can communicate back to you...
You can of course put junk info in the fields if you want, but the purpose of the program is enabling trustworthy lines of communication.
Of course, I generated a PGP keypair back in 1993, stuck it on the MIT keyserver, and it’s there to this day… with a throwaway email address that no longer belongs to me and hopefully no longer exists. The good news for me is that younger me was thoughtful enough to use a pseudonym and non-identifying address, so while I’ve still got the private key around somewhere, it won’t be obvious to someone who steals the email address who that keypair belongs to… and only I have the private key.
I also recall thinking the default algorithm and key length weren’t future proof so spent a good 12 hours generating something stronger, which I believe is still secure today.
So the email and username have no cryptographic purpose, they are just there for convenience.
Thanks I guess...