[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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