User:Tim Starling/Gpg4win tutorial
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Gpg4win is a package of open source utilities for key management, encryption and decryption. It can be used for email encryption in conjunction with web-based email or any other email client.
This tutorial can be moved to the Wikipedia namespace if that is deemed appropriate.
Installation
[edit]- Go to http://www.gpg4win.org/download.html
- Download the full version
- Run the file and follow the prompts to install it
Key generation
[edit]- Start "Kleopatra"
- Click File > New Certificate > Create a personal OpenPGP key pair
- Enter your name and email address, leave the comment blank. Note that the email address you give will be made public.
- Click Next
- Click "Create key"
- Enter a passphrase. This will be used to encrypt the private key on your hard drive.
Publish public key
[edit]- In the main window, right-click on the key you just generated and click "Export certificates".
- Save it somewhere on your hard drive with a .txt extension.
- Open the file in notepad or whatever.
- The key should start with
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Note that it says PUBLIC. If it says "private", you did something wrong. Don't publish your private key.
- Paste the text from the file into Wikipedia while you are logged in, say as a user subpage, or in an HTML comment or collapsed box on your user page (e.g. by enclosing it {{PGP top}}/{{PGP bottom}}).
Receiving encrypted email
[edit]An encrypted message looks like this:
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) hQIOA5iUCyMfX/D2EAgAhikRs40xo05gNu9XSIO2jrjTIShwfWK2d7+9xlv9UjDN ... -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
- Copy the message including the BEGIN line and the END line. You can omit anything outside those lines, such as advertisements.
- Paste it into notepad. Save it to a file.
- In Kleopatra, click "Decrypt/Verify Files" in the toolbar.
- Select the encrypted message file that you just saved.
- Click "Decrypt/Verify"
- If everything worked, a file should have been created in the directory you selected, containing the decrypted message.
Importing a public key
[edit]- Go to the user's user page, find their key.
- Go to the page history, find the revision where the key was added. Make sure the correct user added it.
- Go to the old revision.
- Copy the key out of the old revision, paste it into a text file using notepad.
- Save it to a file, with extension ".gpg". This may be difficult if you have Windows configured to hide file extensions.
- In Kleopatra, click File > Import Certificates
- Choose the .gpg file you saved.
- Click "OK" when it tells you the import was successful.
Sending encrypted email
[edit]- Save the text you want to send in a text file, say using notepad
- In Kleopatra, click "Sign/Encrypt Files"
- Select the file with the message you want to send
- Uncheck "Archive file with..."
- Check "Text output (ASCII armor)"
- Click Next
- Click on your own certificate, click "Add". Then click the certificate of the person you want to send the message to, and click "Add" again.
- Click Next
- Under "OpenPGP Signing Certificate", select your own certificate, if it's not selected already.
- Click "Sign and Encrypt".
- A file will be created which contains the text you need to send. Open the file and paste it into an email.
- Note that the subject line of the email is not encrypted. Don't put private information in the subject line.