How to Create a PGP Key on Ubuntu 24.04 and Decrypt Messages

Encrypting messages is vital to making sure communications are secure. The oldest and still stable method in use today is PGP (Pretty Good…

Photo by Ewan Kennedy on Unsplash

Encrypting messages is vital to making sure communications are secure. The oldest and still stable method in use today is PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). PGP has been around for some time. You can find goodies and software on https://www.openpgp.org/. However, at the end of the day, the CLI (command line interface) is the easiest over messing with some of these clunky or complicated UI tools.

Launch the Password and Keys app on Ubuntu (It’s native)

Screenshot from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Click on the + symbol and select your option according to what your doing. If your signing stuff online or for Github, etc. You can do the SSH Key, but other things you can do the GPG Key. Follow instructions based upon what the site is asking for (This tutorial works for Ubuntu Landscape)

Select your option

Then you generate your key. I don’t recommend doing anything under 4096 nowadays…

4096 on RSA (RSA has had issues folks!…)

Type your favorite Shrimp password and then boom…now you have your key

PGP Key…tasty like Shrimpsss

Now that you have your key, you need to export it so that you can decrypt your messages. Remember, you need to take a decrypted message and unencrypt it so you will need to download a tool to do so:

sudo apt-get install pgpgpg -y

Export your public key to where you will be working on things. Right-click on the key and Export it to the folder you want to work from (cough..cough…Documents?):

You can show your list of keys by running this command

gpg --list-secret-keys

You will see the following type of output:

rickybobby@bubbashrimp:~$ gpg --list-secret-keys
/home/shea/.gnupg/pubring.kbx

sec   rsa4096 2024-05-08 [SC]
      3FA34A2AB4140566C2F011B285A9EFDD1F218A0E
uid           [ultimate] Ricky Bobby (I like speed and shrimp!) <rickybobby@bubbarocks.io>
ssb   rsa4096 2024-05-08 [E]

rickybobby@bubbashrimp:~$

After that you can take the public key of a file that is sent to you and save it into a file:

touch secretshakeandbake-instructions.txt

Open up your favorite editor (cough..vi for warriors…or nano for you scaredycats) and paste in your keys for decryption

Example only..don’t be an idiot and try it ;-)

For more general information on OpenPGP and related tools such as Gnu Privacy
Guard (GPG), please see:

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GnuPrivacyGuardHowto

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
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=Fi3y
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
Thanks,

The Launchpad Team

Run the command to decrypt the file (make sure the private key is there):

pgpgpg -d landscape.txt 'RickyBobby.pgp'

You will then see your message!