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Thread: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

  1. #21
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    Question Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    I'm afraid I'm totally confused. I come from a PGP-on-Windows background. In Ubuntu, I notice that Seahorse is already installed.

    1. I imported my PGP keys into Seahorse successfully.
    2. However, now I have no clue how to use the keys! Someone sends me an encrypted email; how do I decipher it? And how do I encrypt an email back to that person?
    3. In Seahorse, I chose menu options Key -> Back up Key Rings... It saved the key rings as a zip file. How do I restore the key rings (for example if I move to another computer)?

    Thanks

  2. #22
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    Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    Paddy Landau,

    For encrypting / decrypting / signing / verifying, all of this can be done through the command line or with FireGPG for Firefox.
    http://getfiregpg.org/install.html

    As for #3, Seahorse should not have backed up your keyrings as a zip file. I don't recall it doing that. But anyhow, you are supposed to either import them with Seahorse on another computer, or run the gpg --import command in the terminal. Perhaps that there is a file inside of that archive. If so, you would extract it, and then import that file.

    Dr Small
    "Security lies within the user of who runs the system. Think smart, live safe." - Dr Small
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  3. #23
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    Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    Thanks for the reply, Dr Small.

    I've installed FireGPG (lucky I'm a fan of Firefox; what do people do who don't use Firefox?).

    • I encrypt and sign an email using FireGPG and send it to a Windows machine. The Windows machine (using PGP) happily decrypts and verifies it.


    • I encrypt and sign an email on the Windows machine using PGP and send it to the Linux machine. Unfortuately, FireGPG returns an error when attempting to decrypt:

    "Decryption failed. Unknown error. [GNUPG:] NODATA 3"

    Do you know how to resolve this problem? (Otherwise, I'll have to send my received PGP emails to a Windows machine to decrypt.)

  4. #24
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    Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    Well, here's the way I would check to really see what the error is in firefox. You can either launch firefox from a terminal, or copy the encrypted message and paste it into a new document called 'crypt' for example.

    Then from the command line, run:
    Code:
    cat crypt | gpg -d
    And see what the error output is. Occasionally, I have received the problem that webmail / private messages mess up the formating of it, and render the GPG message void.
    "Security lies within the user of who runs the system. Think smart, live safe." - Dr Small
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  5. #25
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    Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    I got the following results.
    Code:
    gpg: invalid armour header: www.pgp.com\n
    gpg: invalid radix64 character 2E skipped
    gpg: invalid radix64 character 2E skipped
    gpg: CRC error; 8BFDD0 - 74D283
    gpg: packet(3) with unknown version 41
    I don't know what it means, but I'd suspect that the incoming code from PGP is simply incompatible with GPG. Would you agree?

    If that's the case, I'll just have to sign into Windows to decrypt these messages.

  6. #26
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    Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    Sorry to bring back an old thread, but I have a question that nobody can answer.. I've been searching google for over a week trying to figure out how to do something that should be very simple.

    How do I use other encryption algorithms in Seahorse? I like twofish and thats what I want to use on my files.. Is there anyway to add twofish to Seahorse? If this cannot be done for some reason, Is there another encryption app that I can use that has more algorithms?

  7. #27
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    Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    Quote Originally Posted by Drizzel View Post
    Sorry to bring back an old thread, but I have a question that nobody can answer.. I've been searching google for over a week trying to figure out how to do something that should be very simple.
    ...
    How do I use other encryption algorithms in Seahorse?
    ...
    Is there another encryption app that I can use that has more algorithms?
    I don't believe that Seahorse is compatible with the Twofish algorithm. I'll look into your second question, and then I'll post again.
    ****Edit: The reason that Seahorse is not compatible with the Twofish algorithm may be that GPG/SSH does not support it. I'm not for sure on this one; GPG/SSH may very well support it - I just don't know for sure. It's just a guess.****
    Last edited by computer_freak_8; September 29th, 2008 at 01:06 AM. Reason: Add information
    I'm just a geek...

  8. #28
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    Lightbulb Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    Quote Originally Posted by computer_freak_8 View Post
    I'll look into your second question, and then I'll post again.
    Ah-ha! I just remembered: Truecrypt. It's open-source, and you can install it by going to http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php or referring to the How-To at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766731


    Good luck!
    computer_freak_8
    I'm just a geek...

  9. #29
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    Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    GPG is indeed compatible with the TwoFish symmetric encryption algorithm. In fact it is ID S10. Ive never used SeaHorse, however I know for a fact about GPG TwoFish encryption capabilities. I know how to force the TwoFish encryption algorithm if you want, if not you usually set your personal-cipher-preferences within the gpg.conf file located within ~/.gnupg. Usually however the cipher selection is set by the recipient's public key, unless you specify something different within the gpg.conf file.

    Let me know if you need more info about this!!

    Another program if you are interested in encrypting files only is the gpgdir program which can be downloaded here:
    http://cipherdyne.org/gpgdir/

  10. #30
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    Smile Re: Beginners Guide to GnuPG

    Quote Originally Posted by kevdog View Post
    GPG is indeed compatible with the TwoFish symmetric encryption algorithm. In fact it is ID S10.
    Thanks! That's why I thought I'd better make note that I was just guessing.

    Good to know. I'll try to remember that.

    Thanks again,
    computer_freak_8
    I'm just a geek...

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