4 ms·
This may be a noob question, but how would you send securely to multiple recipients?
by kitd 12y ago
This may be a noob question, but how would you send securely to multiple recipients?
- galapago 12y agoIf you have their public keys, GPG will "combine" them to produce a single message that all your recipients (with their private keys) can open.
- dredmorbius 12y agoMinor but significant nit: that each of the recipients can open. The reason it's significant: there are encryption protocols which require some subset m < n, but generally m > 1, such that a quorum of members must assemble or cooperate to read a message. If m = n, then you indeed have a situation where all the recipients must cooperate (that is: all are present or contribute their keys) to read a message.
- augustl 12y agoPGP uses the pubkey to encrypt a randomly generated symmetric key, because it's much faster to asymmetrically decrypt a small key and then symmetrically decrypt the entire message. For multiple recipients, this symmetric key is simply encrypted once for each recipient pubkey.
- kitd 12y agoThank you, and to Anderkent. It seems pretty obvious now when you think about it.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Anderkent 12y agohttps://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs/blob/8a278662252cefd21cb41cd1d76f32feabbf9b6b/src/message.js#L147 https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs/blob/8a278662252cefd2... Basically - generate a session key, encrypt the session key with for each recipient, at the end add the text of message encrypted with the session key.
- rmc 12y agoAFAIR GPG will generate a small bit of random data and use that to encrypt the message. For each recipient, tt then encrypts that new key (which is only ~100 bytes) with that recipients private key.