Installing GPG on Linux
For this tutorial, the Ubuntu distro is used. Open the terminal by pressing CTRL+Alt+T together or normally by the applications tray and then enter the following command.
sudo apt install gnupg -y
On successful installation, the output will be as follows:
How to generate PGP keys using GnuPG on Linux?
Linux is a family of open-source operating systems and comes as various distributions or distros. GnuPG or GPG is free software that allows users to encrypt and sign their data and communications. It is based on PGP also called Pretty Good Privacy. It is used to generate PGP keys and can generate public and private keys. The generated PGP keys will have cryptographic features.
PGP Keys are of two types: public and private. The data is encrypted using the public keys and later for decryption, the private keys are used.
In this article, we will learn three different methods for generating keys that are:
- –gen-key: This option helps in generating PGP keys and saves the revocation certificate in the “/root/.gnugp/” directory.
- –full-gen-key: This option is the user-friendly method that permits the generation of the PGP keys in batch mode and accesses the options provided in the dialogue.
- –quick-gen-key: This option offers a quick process of generating the PGP keys and requires only userid and the rest of the settings as the default options.