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What to backup so I can keep digitally signing with a gpg key pair (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Extrasvhx9he to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Hey so I'm new to the world of gpg/pgp. Using a test gpg key pair I created, the goal was to digitally sign a odf so I was wondering what do I backup so I could keep signing digitally using this key in case shit hits the fan and my computer no longer works? Using seahorse, I perfer it to the terminal, the options are to either export the public key or the secret key and I'm honestly confused should I do both or just the secret key? I did notice people also just take a copy of their .gnupg directory but I feel thats just to backup all of their keys including imported ones rather than a singular one. Any help is appreciated preferably as if you were talking to a 5 year old

The TLDR: Just created a gpg key pair now how do I back it up?

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[–] planetaryprotection@midwest.social 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

In practice, I believe the private key should contain the public key (or at least sufficient data to recover it): https://superuser.com/questions/814409/gnupg-opengpg-recovering-public-key-from-private-key#814421

I believe you only need your private key to sign files so, technically you only need to back up the private key, but you should test this to be sure it fits your use case.

Depending on how you're backing things up, and what your security goals are, remember that backing up a private key may involve putting that private key on somebody else's computer - i.e. if you use a remote git repo, or cloud backup service, or even send the key to your own (different) machine over an insecure network. Make sure that you've got a way of securely backing up your private key, otherwise you may undermine the whole cryptography thing anyways :).

As always, you should test by backing up your key(s) and then testing that you can actually restore them and successfully sign a file. Backups are only as good as the last time you tested restoring from them.

[–] Extrasvhx9he 5 points 1 year ago

Really appreciate your help I will continue to test everything out with the testing key pair I made but I believe you're right regarding just needing the private/secret key. As for backups, I'll just use the same methods as my password manager vault and keyfiles backups thanks again

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