Making it simple

[Len Sassaman]

On Tue, 7 May 2002 Sahar_Witt@capgroup.com wrote:

> We were going with PGP 6.5.8 , a public/private key ring was generated and
> the public key sent to the customer. It was then decided that we use GnuPG
> 1.0.7 since it's free, I've generated a new public/private gpg key ring but
> ofcourse I cannot decrypt files sent to me by that customer who encrypted
> them using our old PGP key.
> The preference is to avoid requesting re-importing keys of the customer if
> possible or is it not ?
> In that case , even adding those parameters to my options file won't do my
> any good. I can only import public keys using the gpg -import file.asc
> command but when I attempt to decrypt those files i get the following error
> message :
>
> decryption failed: secret key not available

Let me make sure I understand:

1. You generated a keypair "A" using PGP 6.5.8, and sent the public key
A(pub) to your customer.

2. You generated a new keypair "B" using GnuPG.

3. Customer is encrypting messages to key A(pub), but you only have
"B(sec)" on your private key ring.

[...]

How do you expect to be able to decrypt those messages if you don't have
the secret key? Why did you generate new keys?

You need to either import your first key pair in GnuPG, including the
private key, or you need to send your customer the new public key
"B(pub)".

(This problem isn't about PGP/GnuPG compatibility at all).