Yesterday you may have read my GPG Symmetric Encryption Guide. The last tip on that page was that you should setup GPG keys and publish them on a keyserver. I say this because publishing GPG keys allows you to encrypt things for anyone else who has published their GPG keys without contacting them and exchanging a symmetric key first.

Generating a GPG key

If you haven’t had a GPG or PGP key before, or the one you previously has has expired you will need to generate a new keypair. A keypair consists of a private key, that you keep absolutely secret, and a public key, that you publish to the world.

You should generate a GPG key on your desktop and not on a server. Most likely a server will not have enough entropy in its random number generator and could take a while. All you then have to do is:

gpg --gen-key

You then answer the questions as follows:

• The type of key that you want is ‘DSA and Elgamal’ this way you can both encrypt messages and sign them.
• 1024 bits is probably enough, if you are planning a long expiry for your key you may want to choose 2048, and if your extremely paranoid use 4096.
• I’d suggest a key expiry of two years for a 1024 bit key, but remember you can set an expiry later, and you can also revoke your key at any time if you believe it is compromised.
• Then you fill in your details in the prompts
• Never use a key without a passphrase, any compromise of your key will result in all data people have encrypted for you being compromised and people will be able to sign things as coming from you.

After you enter the details you computer will start generating some very large numbers using cryptographically secure random data, and checking if those numbers are prime. Once your computer has two prime numbers it will generate your keys and save them for you.

Add extra uids to the key

A key can contain many uids. For example your key may contain a work uid and a home uid. If you work at many different companies or have a large number of email addresses then you could have many uids. The uids are what people who sign your key are indicating they trust. So I might decide to indicate that I trust your work uid but because I don’t know you personally  To add new uids to the key you type:

gpg --edit-key
Command> adduid

Then just as before you enter all your details. You can list the uids on the key by typing ‘uid’ at that same prompt. When you are done type ‘save’ to save the key.

Entering the web of trust

The first thing you should do is decide what keyserver you would like to publish your keys to. Most keyservers sync with other ones so this is not really that important. I would suggest hkp://keys.gnupg.net but the choice is up to you. When you have decided what keyserver you want to use place an entry in your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf file like that says ‘keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net’ or whatever server you would like to use.

Now you are ready to build the inner circle of your web of trust. To do this you need to get other people to sign your keys, and them to sign yours. The more signatures you build up the easier it is to find a common link between you that is trusted.

To download another persons key you use the receive key argument for GPG. For example to download my key you can use any of the following commands:

gpg --search-keys "Daniel Hall"
gpg --search-keys "smarthall@gmail.com"
gpg --recv-keys "A3A386ED"

The first two may produce multiple matches and may ask you to select which particular key to download. At this point you should contact the user and confirm their ID so you get the right key.

Now that you’ve downloaded your friends keys you need to confirm who they are and then if all check out sign their keys. When you sign somebodies key you need to be extremely careful, signing a key is your declaration to the world that you trust that this key represents this person. If you sign keys without checking you could end up trusting people who aren’t who they say they are and people will begin to stop trusting you. To verify somebody you should meet them personally (or at an absolute minimum talk over the phone) to get their key fingerprint. As you are signing check that this fingerprint matches the key you are about to sign. To sign my key you could use the following command:

gpg --sign-key "A3A386ED"

Then you upload their key to the keyserver again to ensure that your signature on that key is now visible for the world to see. It is polite to ask people before you sign their key as many spam like signatures on a key may look bad in the eyes of others. If you had just signed my key you would upload it with:

gpg --send-key "A3A386ED"

Now all you need to do is get other people to sign your keys. I’d suggest you start with those people whose keys you have just signed as they’ll be the most willing to help you. You aim is to get enough signatures so that everybody who will need to send an encrypted document to you can find someone they trust who trusts you. It is a little more complicated than that but its essentially the idea.

Random Thought: What should the random thought on my next blog post be? Hrmmmm.