3 min read

On Using GPG

Like most people*, I use GPG everyday. Although most often associated with email, that’s usually not what I use it for. Here are a couple of ways that I do.

Securing Passwords

I used to use LastPass as my password manager, and it was nice and convenient. But it always bothered me that my password vault was located in the cloud. I researched it and cryptographers vouched for it, but I was still paranoid. Here is a list of concerns that I had:

  • Do they use and save keys or is my key generated on my machine?
  • Are they making copies of my data?
  • Are they scrubbing and deleting my data when I stop using their service?
  • What if they’re subpoenaed by the government or receive a secret NSA warrant? How would I even know?
  • Is the code open source? Can it be audited?
  • What about their security?

And companies and governments lie, especially when either money or privacy (or both) is concerned.

Yes, I realize that it could be just as easy for a determined adversary to get into my box as a cloud service. But, and this is important to me, I know how my data is encrypted, I know where it is at all times, and I know that my key is protected by a passphrase even if my box is compromised.

Ok, having said that, I decided to write my own password manager to address these concerns. Most importantly, I didn’t try to write my own encryption algorithm (because that would be dumb) or do anything cute, because I knew that I would use GPG to encrypt and sign my password vault. It was a lot of fun to do, and I published it to npm, as I was writing mostly JavaScript at the time (I’ve since ported it to Go, and it’s better, of course).

So, I use gpg-agent to store my passphrase, and I’m happy. It’s not as convenient as LastPass or another browser plugin that can automatically log me in, but somehow I still manage.

End-to-end File Encryption

I have lots of super secrets on my machine that I don’t want anyone else to see. To be honest, I really don’t, but that’s not the point of privacy and encryption. Often what I’ll do is tar up files or whole directories and then encrypt that with my key. I can then store that anywhere I please in the cloud. For instance, I can push my encrypted password vault to the cloud and then pull that down onto any machine that I want, and everything is in sync.


Signing is pretty ubiquitous. Sometimes I’ll sign a file to send to a friend, not just so they know it was from me but that they also know that no bits were fiddled with in transit. But since this post is limited to how I use GPG every day, I’ll limit it to one particular example.

GitHub added the nice feature of commit signing with your GPG key. Here is a snippet from my .gitconfig file that shows the pertinent bits:

    name = Benjamin Toll
    email = ben@example.com
    signingkey = B331L33T
    br = branch
    # -S = GPG-sign commit.
    ci = commit -S
    ca = commit -S --amend

Who Needs GPG Browser Plugins?

Encrypt and paste into web mail:

  cat << eof | gpg -ear ben@example.com | xsel -b


  cat | gpg -d

Sign and paste into web mail:

  cat << eof | gpg --clear-sign | xsel -b

* I just chortled.