Werner Koch writes: > On Tue, 17 Sep 2019 06:51, [email protected] said: > >> Regenerating private keys is mathematically trivial but tool-wise >> a little tricky. It seems that quite some people were troubled > > What's wrong with > > gpg --import backup-of-private-key.gpg > > the private key include the entire public key.
That it won't work in some circumstances, e.g. those cited the line below those you have quoted (fixing the wrong private/public you got obviously right anyway drafting your reply): """Regenerating public keys is mathematically trivial but tool-wise a little tricky. It seems that quite some people were troubled by this problem due to different reasons (I not attempted to confirm all of these): * Using (old) backups of keys for decrypting with only private key available. * Smartcards with only private key on them * Forensic scenarios """ Therefore some exports (or copies of old secring.gpg) just do no include the public key, otherwise import would be trivial. Usually problem reports of other users look like [0] and do not contain any direct solution, only workarounds e.g. "get your missing public key from somewhere else". As the key causing me problems was very old, I do not have the software at hand that was used to create it, nor it is clear if I only stored away the secring or an explicit private key export, therefore I cannot find out what exactly caused the situation, just that for me as for many others import or decrypt does not work any more. I believe that decryption worked with older gpg1 versions and this kind of key data but I do not remember when and the gpg1 software version used back then. hd [0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/267844/gpg-secret-key-not-available-when-sec-pub-key-are-in-keyring _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
