[pmmail-list] PGP

[Brian Morrison]

On Thu, 01 Mar 2001 09:23:10 -0500, Edward B. Germain wrote:

>Hello list,
>
>I'm fuzzy about security.  Is there clear documentation about it
>somewhere?

Depends what you want to know. The PGPi site at www.pgpi.com should be
a good starting point.

>
>And I've a problem: PMmail (Windows 2K) and I don't agree on what my
>passphrase is, and I am not sure how to reenter it.

You can't.

>Do I delete the
>pubring* and secring* files?  And how do you start over?  

If you have not widely disseminated your public key it isn't too
tricky. Just tell those that use it to remove the public key from their
key rings and send them the new key.

It is good practice to produce a revocation certificate for your key
when you generate it then store it somewhere safe, otherwise you cannot
revoke the key at all. This can be done after saving a copy of your key
files, you'll need them after the key is revoked anyway. Then produce
the revocation certificate (really a copy of the public key marked as
revoked) by extracting an ascii version of this key (by keyID or email
address). Then copy the saved keyrings back where they were and put the
extracted certificate on a floppy and write protect it and label it.
You will probably need the PGP command line tools to do this.

If you have not sent your key to the key servers, just delete the files
and start again, assuming you don't have too many other keys in there.
If you just delete the secring then you will be OK in this
circumstance.

HTH

-- 
Brian Morrison                                  bdm@fenrir.demon.co.uk
              do you know how far this has gone?
               just how damaged have I become?
                                      'Even Deeper' by Nine Inch Nails



- pmmail-list - The PMMail Dicussion List ---------------------------
To POST to the list, send your message to
pmmail-list@blueprintsoftwareworks.com

To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message to mdaemon@bmtmicro.com with the first 
line of the message body being...

UNSUBSCRIBE pmmail-list@blueprintsoftwareworks.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------