verifying whithout key

[Anthony E . Greene]

On Mon, 04 Jun 2001 18:24:41 Jan Schneider wrote:
>is there any way to verify signed messages without having the owners key?
>pgp complains but does the verifying, gpg doesn't at all.

If PGP/GPG does not have the key, it cannot verify the signature.

Verification requires PGP/GPG to decrypt the signature using the signers
public key. The decrypted data should be a hash of the message data. PGP/GPG
compares this decrypted hash with a hash it generates itself. If they match,
the signature is verified. But it needs the signer's public key to decrypt
the signature data to recover the original hash.

Tony
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