Hi Leif, On Saturday, January 29, 2005, at 3:51:01 PM PST, you wrote:
JJ>> Not so. You do not need the sender's key to read an encrypted JJ>> e-mail, because it will be encrypted to the recipient public key. JJ>> The recipient only needs his own private key. > Depends on how you encrypt it. If you encrypt a message using your > own secret key, then people would use your public key to decrypt it. > This is useful if you want to encrypt a message only to keep it from > casual eyes. No, that's not quite right. A "public key" is never used to decrypt an encrypted message. Only the holder of the private (secret) key and its corresponding passphrase can decrypt a message encrypted to the corresponding public key. There is a method of signing that is not "clear signing", and it's called "ascii armoring". It *looks like* it's encrypted, but it's not. In that case, anyone with PGP or GnuPG using the "decrypt & verify" function will convert the message back to clear text at the same time the signature is verified (providing that the public key of the signer is present on the recipient's public keyring). Again though, the only way to decrypt an *encrypted* message is with one's own private key and passphrase, and the message must be encrypted using the corresponding public key. A single message can also be encrypted to several different public keys, so that each holder of the corresponding private keys can decrypt it using their own private key/passphrase. -- Melissa PGP public keys: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]&Body=Please%20send%20keys TB! v2.12.00 on Windows XP 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1
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