If this is your first time thru this tutorial, you can almost certainly ignore the following warning. Some keyservers are known to be compromised (e.g. However, I've abandoned this way for the moment, until I better understand the technologies and vulnerabilities. The simple way to give out your public key (in a reddit thread) is to paste it into a reply.Īnother way is to publish your public key to a keyserver. Nobody can send encrypted messages to you unless you post/paste your public key somewhere where others can use it. To send an encrypted message to someone, you MUST have their public key. (see below)Īlice and John don't even need to know each other's name or email address. There are 3 things in the PGP universe: public keys, private keys, and messages.Ī PGP message is a chunk of text that looks like:Įach person is designated by a public key.Īlice and John can exchange messages only if John has Alice's public key and Alice has John's public key.Īlice must 'import' John's public key and John must 'import' Alice's public key. You can't send the same encrypted chunk to two people. Quickstart example if you're using gpg on linux: See bottom comment in this thread. You can't just type in a password, so you're not in Kansas anymore.
