Tag Archive for 'gpg'

Installing GPG on Mac OS X

Published on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

GPG is an open-source implementation of the PGP encryption standard, useful for encrypting and signing digital communications. Think sending a letter in a sealed envelope rather than a postcard.

I’m currently using MacGPG 1.4.9 along with the GPGMail extension to the Apple Mail application on OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard). At present, GPGMail is incompatible with OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The installation is fairly simple, but can be confusing for those unfamiliar with PGP/GPG. I’ve outlined the process below.

  1. Download and install MacGPG. The disk image opens a graphical installer.
  2. Import your keypair, or create a new one. (If you don’t like the command line, GPG Keychain Access provides a nice GUI to do this)
  3. Download GPGMail. This adds GPG functionality to Mail.
  4. Quit Mail
  5. Launch the GPGMail installation script.
  6. Restart Mail. There should be a PGP screen in Mail > Preferences.

Your public key is relatively useless if nobody else knows what it is. I suggest making it available using a system like the MIT Public Key Server.

Revoking My Old Public Key

Published on Sunday, April 12, 2009 in General. 0 Comments Tags: .

A few months ago, my laptop suffered a filesystem crash and I had to perform a complete re-install. I had back-ups. No big deal. However, while I was in Australia, the back-up of my GPG key was on an inaccessible system in Scotland, resulting in me having to generate a new keypair.

Now I’m home and have access to all my files again, and seeing as (almost) everyone is using my new public key anyway, I thought I’d be as well cutting down the confusion and properly revoking the old one.

This is simple enough provided you know your passphrase or generated a revocation certificate before you forgot it! In my case, I issued the following commands:

$ gpg --output revoke.asc --gen-revoke 1A27C8BB
$ gpg --import revoke.asc
$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu  --send-keys 1A27C8BB

Easy.

New Year, New Public Key

Published on Thursday, January 1, 2009 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

A couple of days ago the Ubuntu 8.04 installation on my EEE 701 suffered a nasty file system crash.

I’ve reinstalled from a USB stick and everything seems to work as it did before. The only loss appears to be my GPG private key.

I have a copy of it on a machine at home, but it’s not accessible over the ‘net, so I’ve decided to create a new keypair.

My new public key is on the MIT keyserver (and probably others by now).

Fingerprint: 6F0B A2DC 2CF8 12A1 4695 5A00 A4D0 7E58 8424 7B1B