UMBC CMSC202, Computer Science II, Fall 1998, Sections 0101, 0102, 0103, 0104

PGP Help


There are several ways to get started on PGP, which stands for "Pretty Good Privacy".


If all you want to do is verify a piece of mail from Prof. Chang, then follow these instructions:
  1. make a directory in your home directory called .pgp mkdir .pgp
  2. copy the pubring.pgp file from /afs/umbc.edu/users/c/h/chang/pub/cs202/pgp/pubring.pgp cp /afs/umbc.edu/users/c/h/chang/pub/cs202/pgp/pubring.pgp ~/.pgp/
  3. save the email message in question in a file, call it verify.asc
  4. check the file with pgp using the following command pgp verify.asc
  5. You should get a response like the following No configuration file found. Pretty Good Privacy(tm) 2.6.2 - Public-key encryption for the masses. (c) 1990-1994 Philip Zimmermann, Phil's Pretty Good Software. 11 Oct 94 Uses the RSAREF(tm) Toolkit, which is copyright RSA Data Security, Inc. Distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Export of this software may be restricted by the U.S. government. Current time: 1998/01/26 21:14 GMT Warning: Unrecognized ASCII armor header label "Charset:" ignored. File has signature. Public key is required to check signature. . Good signature from user "Richard Chang <chang@cs.umbc.edu>". Signature made 1998/01/21 17:20 GMT WARNING: Because this public key is not certified with a trusted signature, it is not known with high confidence that this public key actually belongs to: "Richard Chang <chang@cs.umbc.edu>". Plaintext filename: verify
If the UNIX shell could not find the pgp command, try /usr/local/bin/pgp instead. You apparently do not have the directory /usr/local/bin in your PATH environment variable. (You should.)


Last Modified: 17 Sep 1998 16:40:50 EDT by Richard Chang

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