Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shdadow_8472, with a side project. Let’s get started!
While downloading a new-to-me distro this week, I again was wall-of-text’ed to a halt by GPG. GNU Privacy Gurad is a technology no new and serious Linux enthusiast user can go six months without slamming into. The specifics of how it works are in about every tutorial that shows you the basics – which invariably never includes an instruction set I can understand regarding file verification, and I make it a point to attempt concepts I find difficult, but important whenever they come up.
I’m still not yet successful, but here is what I’ve learned: web of trust. I trust Dan. Dan trusts Stella. Stella trusts George. I don’t know George, but he has a file I want to ensure is authentic after downloading. Through the chain of trust I’ve established, I can trust George’s cryptographic signature based of his private key, and the file I’ve downloaded from him when I use George’s matching public key to verify it.
My understanding of GPG this week has gone from “clear as swamp water” to “clear as stained glass.”
Final Question
On a previous GPG attempt, I learned about centralized key servers, but I’m still clueless about their practical use. How in the world does one enter one of these “webs of trust?”