OpenPGP Applications and Tools

Gnome OpenPGP Applet

Every now and then, you will come across a block of text similar to the following:

Somehow people think, pasting encrypted messages or public keys on websites is a good idea. Its not, as any potential reader will have to copy the whole text to a file, save that file, decrypt it, and only then will be able to decide if the content was really worth all the trouble.

The OpenPGP Applet takes at least some pain out of this, by allowing you to work directly with your clipboard, without the need of creating a file.

The applet was introduced and available exclusively on the Tails Live Linux distribution, but has since made available to other Gnome Desktop environments.

With the OpenPGP Applet you can:

Encrypt any text in your clipboard with a passphrase;

Encrypt and sign any text in your clipboard to an OpenPGP public key;

Decrypt and verify any text in your clipboard.

The OpenPGP Applet page in the Tails Wiki has all the details.

Install openpgp-applet from the Ubuntu Software Center …

… or with the command-line:

$ sudo apt install openpgp-applet

Seahorse Nautilus Extension

Seahorse, sometimes also called “Secretes and Keys” is the name of the Gnome Desktop application that provides a graphical user interface for the user to manage his secrets inside the Gnome-Keyring.

The “Nautilus extension for Seahorse integration” allows encryption and decryption of OpenPGP files using GnuPG right from the Nautilus file-manager.

The Seahorse Nautilus extensions in action.

Install seahorse-nautilus from the Ubuntu Software Center …

… or with the command-line:

$ sudo apt install seahorse-nautilus

Signing GIT Operations

In Version Control you find a description to set up git for signing and verifying various operations.