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nalply
Asked: 2010-09-16 03:51:21 +0800 CST

GPG encrypt and decrypt with ssh-agent

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I use ssh regularly and have ssh-agent set up.

How can I use ssh keys to gpg-encrypt a file?

Edit: It seems that this is impossible. Why? ssh can encrypt traffic, so why not also files?

ssh gpg

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    No, SSH keys are not PGP keys and serve different purpose .
    You must have PGP keys in GnuPG keyring.
    But - you can convert GPG keys to SSH keys (using gpgkey2ssh) and gpg-agent can take care of SSH keys (using --enable-ssh option). I believe no such tool exists for converting SSH keys to GPG keys and cannot exist.

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  2. It seems that this is impossible. Why? ssh can encrypt traffic, so why not also files?

    SSH can encrypt, just not in a GPG compatible manner.

    Per https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/27005/encrypting-file-only-with-ssh-priv-key:

    openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -in my.pdf -out mydata.enc

    and

    openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d -in mydata.enc -out mydecrypted.pdf

    should do the trick.

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