What does key properties validity and trust 'None' mean???

Bo Berglund bo.berglund at telia.com
Sat Aug 19 11:01:31 CEST 2006


On Sat, 19 Aug 2006 10:11:58 +0200, samuel at Update.UU.SE (Samuel
]slund) wrote:

>
>If I read you correctly you are exporting Keys from PGP7 for use with 
>GnuPG.  Since you have used PGP before I assume that you are familiar 
>with the "web-of-trust". The owner trust on a key is not exported when 
>you export the key, thus you have to assign it yourself and unless you 
>have signed a key yourself no key will be truted unless you asign some
>owner trust to the keys in the path to the key you want to use.
>
>I hope this makes sence,
>//Samuel

No, I was referring to PGP7 just to indicate that I have been using
encryption before even though I am new to GnuPG. The old PGP keys are
not the issue (yet).

But your answer cleared the handling for me. In short these are the
steps:
1. Create a key pair in GPG
2. Export your public key to an asc file
3. Hand this over to a person you want to communicate with
4. He imports the key into WinPT by drag-drop
   Now both Validity and Trust are 'None'
5. Next he selects the key and uses Key/Sign to sign the key
   At this stage the Validity switches to 'Full' but Trust is None
6. Finally he opens the key properties and changes "Ownertrust"
   This can be changedto something like Ultimate or Full

Now the key is fully trusted and valid, I guess.

PGP7 compatibility
I was already able to import my old PGP keys into GnuPG (WinRT) so I
could read my old encrypted emails from a few years back through
GnuPG.

I found one strange glitch though, old emails containing Swedish
characters decrypt to cleartext but are missing the Swedish chars. So
the words look really strange when there are supposed to be one of
åäöÅÄÖ there, these are simply gone....


/Bo
Bo Berglund




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