Hi, I'm pretty new to gpg and openpgp, but I have been using it casually for a while to encrypt things occasionally. I have a question about something that happened with an old set of keys, stored in a pgp .asc file created by a windows version of pgp 8.1. The .asc file basically contains armor ascii for both the public and private keys in one file, like this:
-----BEGIN PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK----- Version: PGP 8.1 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com lQHpBDnK0XoRBADYZNigCSuy0tUEQwbIitqOD3Aer5VHCabX0ZnBPWl6go9kQm/t ......chunk of text removed..... DAKPt5ea3+kjvQbXPFBVsyDQ4w7vJ2F+5zQcxjnij0cSqjOirkNMHAYD =uAGK -----END PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK----- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: PGP 8.1 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com mQGiBDnK0XoRBADYZNigCSuy0tUEQwbIitqOD3Aer5VHCabX0ZnBPWl6go9kQm/t .........chunk of text removed r8GijKr01256AJ9L9eqZaXbDvU02Px9OqqcHJavbxgCg/DLhqrcamZCvrdkJrsxp k09bepE= =HApt -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Anyway, I imported the keys by doing "pgp --import ./oldkey.asc" and I was able to decrypt my old files. Later on, I decided to export the armor ascii of both keys from gpg, but something curious happened. I expected both keys that gpg exported to match the old keys in the .asc file, but only the private key matched. So, for some reason the exported private key was the same and the public key was different: -----BEGIN PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) lQHpBDnK0XoRBADYZNigCSuy0tUEQwbIitqOD3Aer5VHCabX0ZnBPWl6go9kQm/t ....chunk of text removed..... DAKPt5ea3+kjvQbXPFBVsyDQ4w7vJ2F+5zQcxjnij0cSqjOirkNMHAYD =uAGK -----END PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK----- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) mQGiBDnK0XoRBADYZNigCSuy0tUEQwbIitqOD3Aer5VHCabX0ZnBPWl6go9kQm/t ....chunk of text removed.... ooyq9NduegCfS/XqmWl2w71NNj8fTqqnByWr28YAoPwy4aq3GpmQr63ZCa7MaZNP W3qR =uwWg -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- What's interesting to me is that the top half of the public keys are the same, only the bottom half changes. What I want to know is 1. Why did this happen? 2. Will this be a problem on my end? To me it looks like the public key that gpg uses is completely different from the key that I import in, so will my private key still be able to decrypt from it? thanks for any help that you can give me. -- kr aid k__r...@fastmail.fm -- http://www.fastmail.fm - The way an email service should be _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users