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Question about PGP Keys?
I've been doing some exploring in the deep web and I've noticed that when users post their PGP keys as such
BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK
20 or more lines of code later...
END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK
So my first question is how could I see my PGP key as code?
Second question is how does PGP communication work? Does the other person automatically get my PGP key when I send them an encrypted message?
2 Answers
- Uncle PennybagsLv 76 years ago
I've actually spent some time studying PGP and it's actually quite a neat system.
One of the problems with secure cryptography is securely exchanging keys with your fellow communicant. PGP solves this by turning this problem upside down. You don't exchange keys. You exchange Locks! The Public Key that you exchange is actually the lock. It tells the sender how to encrypt the message so the person who created the lock can decrypt it with their private key. And unlike exchanging the key to decrypt, you don't need to worry about securely exchanging the public keys (locks). It's perfectly fine to make the Public key public for all to see.
But you do have to exchange the Public keys first. You can do this by ordinary email, by putting it on a web site for others to retrieve, or uploading it to a key server. And the first thing you have to do is generate your Public/Private key set. When you do this and tell that tool to export your public key, you should see it as you just discussed.
