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Encrypting and decrypting single file with master password and passphrase

rated 0 times [ 1] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1057 / 1 Year ago, tue, may 16, 2023, 6:30:42

Last night my system shutdown unexpectedly and when i restart it, it gave me superblock error. will then i fixed a little but. i was able to retrive my encrypted files which i encrypted my pgp public key but i was not able to retrive my private key or public key

now i have ecrypted file which cannot be open because i have lost my private key.

is there any way that i can encrypt my file by providing only master password and passphrase and no physical key or private key

and when i am on another computer i can easily open it my same master password and passphrase.

Thanks in advance

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lintical

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4 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago lishrag · Accepted Answer

is there any way that i can encrypt my file by providing only master
password and passphrase and no physical key or private key ... and
when i am on another computer i can easily open it my same master
password and passphrase.

Yes, definitely.

Every time you try to encrypt some input, GnuPG actually generates a random session key which it then uses to symmetrically encrypt the input (using whichever cipher-algo is specified -- CAST5 by default). Then the session key is encrypted with any combination of passphrases & gpg public keys and THOSE are what you use to access the data.

Here's an example of running gpg to encrypt some data and make it accessible via both a simple passphrase and a couple public keys:

gpg -cer barack@devnull --cipher-algo aes256 -r bob@devnull <FILE>

Note that cipher-algo is of course optional.

EDIT:

Per request, here's a simplified example which only uses a symmetric key.

gpg -c --cipher-algo aes256 --force-mdc <FILE>

See the man page for an explanation of --force-mdc, but note that I added it on purpose; by default it's not used when only doing -c/--symmetric.