Transition to a near-perfect GPG key pair

GPG keys are super useful, but as of December 2021, I need to change mine, to reach the recommendations for GPG key pairs. This blog post will explain what is a GPG key, why it is useful, why I need to change it and how I did that in the most preferable way.

Table of Contents

What is a GPG key why is it useful and why do I need to change it ?

Practical transition

Clean the GnuPG installation

gpg –export -a > all_publickeys gpgconf –kill gpg-agent mv .gnupg .gnupg_old mkdir .gnupg chmod 700 .gnupg

https://www.gnupg.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GnuPG

cd .gnupg vim dirmngr.conf nanoy@azilis  ~/.gnupg  cat dirmngr.conf keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org

vim gpg-agent.conf nanoy@azilis  ~/.gnupg  cat gpg-agent.conf default-cache-ttl 600 pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-gnome3 default-cache-ttl-ssh 600

vim gpg.conf

Create the master key pair

Disconnect computer from the internet

Create subkeys

Splitting the master keys and subkeys

Transition statement

Wrap up

Further reading and references