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A Question about GnuPg

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IrishPyroWolf1994:
Hey everyone I just thought of a question regarding GnuPG and I thought I'd ask it even though I'm pretty sure I already know what the answer is. The question is: Is it possible to encrypt a file or say an usb flash drive with a GnuPG public key, and then decrypt it with the associated secret key? The reason I'm asking is that I was hoping to give a flash drive to a friend that is filled with a bunch of files that are.....or questionable content. I wasn't sure how to encrypt it, then I thought of GnuPG....i.e. I'd encrypt it with his public key, then give it to him, and then he can decrypt it with his secret key so he can access the files. What do y'all think? Is that possible? And what about on Windows? Because that is the OS my friend is running (and yes I have been trying to convince him to switch to linux....no success so far in that regard)

MamaLiberty:
I'm not sure. I can encrypt attachments in email... any length, and any format so far as I know. Text or graphics files anyway.

My thumb drive is encrypted a different way, however. A friend did mine, and I don't remember enough to tell you how.  khyeron could walk you through it, I'm sure. Send him a PM and ask.

securitysix:
According to this article on TechRepublic, yes, you can encrypt files with GnuPG.

As for the Windows side, yes, GPG encryption/decryption is available for Windows.  A quick Google search turned up GPG4Win.  So as long as there is a Windows compatible program that will open the files once they're decrypted, he should be good to go.

IrishPyroWolf1994:
Okay thanks for the suggestion about khyeron ML.

And thanks for the info and link securitysix. :)

khyeron:
The answer is yes and yes.  The KDE (for linux) encryption keyring manager (KGPG I believe its called)  will add this as a context menu to your right click menus in KDE.  Seahorse (the gnome one) should do the same on older versions.  The new versions don't.

You can also do it by command line if you lean that way.

The windows GPGwin package should install GPGWin not gpgwinlite, that one includes a few less things and skips the documentation, and the docs might help your friend out.

That said, the KDE apps that were ported to Windows 32/64 appear remarkably well done.  They've even ported the gnu privacy assistant.  Very impressive.

The other way to do it is to run truecrypt on his windows box, and snag gdecrypt or whatever replacement exists for truecrypt on linux these days, and simply truecrypt the entire USB drive, treating it as a removable truecrypt drive.  Truecrypt does something natively that is rather cool if you have the processing power, and that is cascading encryption (basically encrypting a sector with algorithm A, then B then C.)  Should make it practically impervious even to quantum computing and the vaunted magic machines that are probably being used by various state scientists to justify trillions in "research" spending.

Sorry for the delayed response, I realize this thread has been open for almost a month now.

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