In this blog post you’ll learn how to manage your keys using Kleopatra Key Manager on Windows. We will show you basic operations such as importing and exporting keys, and certifying them. As usual, this is accompanied by instructional video showing you all the process.
You’ve already personalized your Cryptoucan™ and got your own set of keys. Now it’s time to finally show you how to import other users‘ keys, how to certify them and how to export your keys.
If you came just to see the instructional video, click here!
You’re going to use this function if you ever want people to send you encrypted e-mails. This will export your public key, which you can then put to your personal webpage, upload to a key server, or just send to people. Whenever someone’s going to send you an encrypted e-mail, they’ll use this exported key, and you’ll decrypt the message with your private key.
Once you open Kleopatra, you’re going to see your key in the list right away.
Picture 1: Exporting key
Whenever you’d like to send an encrypted e-mail to someone, you’ll need to use their public key. It’s a good idea to build a library of keys to make encrypting an easy, quick process.
First of all, you’ll need to download the key from trusted source. Then follow these steps:
Kleopatra will immediately ask you whether you want to certify the key you’ve just imported. We’re going to explain this in the next paragraph. If you just want to import the key, click *no* and the process is done.
Picture 2: Do you want to certify the key?
By certifying the keys you’ve imported, you’re making sure the key really belongs to the person it’s supposed to. This is done by comparing fingerprints. Fingerprint is a kind of checksum which is statistically unique to each key.
Picture 3: Fingerprint
To check the fingerprint of the key you’ve imported, you’ll have to retrieve the key fingerprint from the key owner via a trusted channel. Some examples are:
You’re going to need Cryptoucan™ to finish this process, as you are signing the key with your own certificate.
To certify the key:
Picture 4: Signing the key with Cryptoucan™
If you just want to see the certificate fingerprint, you can do that too.
You can also see other information about the key here.
Picture 5: Key details
In case you’re still struggling with some of these actions, watch our instructional video:
Video 1: Cryptoucan™ usage: Key management
Thank you very much for reading, we will see you next week!