Create, sign, and publish your PGP key with Seahorse

I have espoused encryption on Ghacks plenty of times. I find most users do not employ encryption, of any kind, which is somewhat surprising given the constant rate at which data is stolen. With the help of encryption your data is much safer than it would be in plain text. To deal with encryption you have to use encryption keys. This means you will giving and getting keys to/from various people (or within a business, different departments). If the amount of keys you manage gets too large, key management can become rather challenging. Fortunately there are tools out there to aid you in this task.

Once such tool is Seahorse. Seahorse is the default keyring manager for the GNOME desktop and it makes the task of key management quite simple. In this article you will see how easily Seahorse handles creation, signing, and publishing of your PGP key to a PGP keyserver. Of course this does assume you want to publish your key on a public keyserver. There are benefits to publishing your PGP key. For instance it makes for easy access to your key so that those who need it, can get it. In some cases you would want to publish these keys to a non-public keyserver. For the simplicty of this article we will be publishing to the Ubuntu keyserver.

Features

Seahorse contains a number of outstanding features:

• Create/manage both PGP and ssh keys.
• Publish/retrieve keys from keyserver.
• Key backup.
• Passphrase caching.

But the feature that makes Seahorse stand out the most is it's user-friendly interface. A task which other applications can make new users shy away from, Seahorse makes simple. You can create, sign, and publish your own keys to a keyserver quickly and easily.

Read more...
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/09/19/create-sign-and-publish-your-pgp-key-with-seahorse/

Don