key security

[Steve Butler]

1.  Removable media is good.  I leave mine on my hard drive but other folks
don't have access to it  <<so I believe anyway :-) >>.  If you choose to
leave it on your hard drive use a nice, long, easy to remember but hard to
guess pass phrase.

2.  Encrypt to recipient does not use your private key.  You would use your
private key to sign if you should choose to also do that.


BTW, my attempt to reply directly to you resulted in this message:
Reporting-MTA: dns;milkyway.fchn.com
Received-From-MTA: dns;milkyway.fchn.com
Arrival-Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 13:12:01 -0700

Final-Recipient: rfc822;jeroen@valcke.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeroen Valcke [mailto:jeroen@valcke.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 12:37 PM
To: gnupg-users@gnupg.org
Subject: key security


Hello,

I'm new to the list and GnuPG. I have some small (newbie) questions.

1/ What about key security. Do you people all leave your private key on
the harddisk of your machine. On Debian linux that's in the .gnupg
directory. How about putting this whole directory on removable media
(for example diskette) A colleague of mine has his on a remove USB
media. Good idea? reactions? impractical?

2/ To encrypt a message all I need is the recipients public key, right?
Encryption is done solely with the public key of the recipient. My
private key is not used, is this correct?

-Jeroen-
A confused newbie.

-- 
Jeroen Valcke               jeroen@valcke.com   

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