Importing A Public Key - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 - STEP BY STEP GUIDE Manual

Appendix B. Getting Started with Gnu Privacy Guard 157
Figure B-1. Copying Your Public Key
Note that if you are submitting your key to another Web-based keyserver, the above transaction is
essentially the same.
That is all you need to do. Regardless of whether you use the shell prompt or the Web, you see a
message that your key was successfully submitted — either at the shell prompt or at the keyserver's
website. From now on, users who want to communicate securely with you can import your public key
and add it to their keyring.
B.6. Importing a Public Key
The other end of key exchange is importing other people's public keys to your keyring — is just as
simple as exporting keys. When you import someone's public key, you can decrypt their email and
check their digital signature against their public key on your keyring.
One of the easiest ways to import a key is to download the key or save it from a website.
After downloading a key and saving it to the file key.asc, use the following command to add it to
your keyring.
gpg --import key.asc
Another way to save a key is to use a browser's Save As feature. If you are using a browser such
as Mozilla, and you locate a key at a keyserver, you can save the page as a text file (go to File =>
Save Page As). In the drop-down box next to Files of Type, choose Text Files (*.txt). Then, you can
import the key — but remember the name of the file you saved. For example, if you saved a key as a
text file called newkey.txt, to import the file, at a shell prompt, type the following command:
gpg --import newkey.txt