Secret key without public key

[Tyler Spivey]

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I ran a brief test, and was able to recover from this. Before you do
anything, I recommend making a backup of ~/.gnupg so you can easily
restore it. Here are my results, where 0xae742aaf is my key:

#backup ~/.gnupg
cp -a ~/.gnupg ~/.gnupg.orig
#make and encrypt a test file
touch test
gpg -e -r 0xae742aaf test

That worked fine. Then I moved the public keyring to break things:
mv ~/.gnupg/pubring.gpg ~/.gnupg/pubring.gpg.orig
gpg test.gpg
and it said:
gpg: keyring `/home/tyler/.gnupg/pubring.gpg' created
gpg: key AE742AAF: secret key without public key - skipped
gpg: encrypted with RSA key, ID C6570DCB
gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available

#export the secret key, because exporting public won't work
gpg --export-secret-key -o secret.key 0xae742aaf
#delete it so we can re-import
gpg --delete-secret-key 0xae742aaf
(answer yes to the prompts)
gpg --import secret.key
The output included:
gpg: key AE742AAF: secret key imported
gpg: key AE742AAF: public key "Tyler Spivey <tspivey8 at gmail.com>"
imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
gpg:       secret keys read: 1
gpg:   secret keys imported: 1

once done, the decryption of test.gpg worked fine.

Hope this helps.

CONNIE RODRIGUEZ wrote:
> Great!!  Thank you for your help.  I will post on how it went.
>  
>>>> Larry Brower <larry-lists at maxqe.com> 3/29/2010 7:15 PM >>>
> CONNIE RODRIGUEZ wrote:
>> This is a development box..no backup.  Can I copy from the another 
>> environment?
>>
> 
> yes if you have the key on another server such as a production box.
> 
> gpg --export-secret-key -a > a-filename-here
> 
> copy it to the dev box with something like scp
> 
> then on the dev box
> 
> gpg --import a-filename-here
> 
> make sure to remove the file you generated exporting the key. You 
> don't want someone to see copy it ;)
> 
> shred -f -n 1000 -z -v -u a-filename-here
> 
> 
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- --
Tyler Spivey - PGP Key ID: 0xae742aaf
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