[wellylug] gpg info
Richard Hector
richard at walnut.gen.nz
Sun Feb 23 12:30:38 NZDT 2014
On 22/02/14 10:47, Kingsley G. Morse Jr. wrote:
> 1.) Do you happen to know if data can be encrypted
> with both public and private keys (the later
> being called a signature)?
You can certainly both encrypt and sign. AFAIK a signature is normally
an encrypted one-way hash of the content, not the whole content
encrypted; that would be a bit of a waste of bandwidth.
> 2.) Can any individual key be used for both
> encryption and decryption (although not on the
> same exact data)?
Exactly what key is used for what gets more complicated - some things
are actually done with sub-keys rather than your main key, but for most
purposes I don't think it's necessary to know (and I don't remember the
details). There's interesting stuff at these links, among others:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/43590/pgp-why-have-separate-encryption-subkey
https://wiki.debian.org/Subkeys
Richard
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