The following step is uploading your PGP public key to a public location, so others will be able to send you encrypted messages. Also, we need to publicise the download URL, so others will be able to find and verify your key easily.
At the end of this guide, you will have your PGP key publicly available on the Internet. In addition, your Twitter profile and email signature will both feature the public URL pointing to your public key.
The first step is exporting the fingerprint of your PGP key. The fingerprint allows anyone to verify the authenticity of your published public PGP key.
- Open Kleopatra from the Start menu
- Right-click your key-pair and select 'Certificate Details'
- Select your fingerprint (the long string of characters and numbers) and copy it onto the pasteboard
- Open Notepad and paste the string there
- Add some extra spaces after every fourth character to make the fingerprint more readable
Although we already exported the public key in an earlier guide, but I detail these steps for the sake of completeness. Feel free to jump to the next section if your public key is already exported.
- Now go back to Kleopatra and right-click the key again. Select 'Export Certificates' and save your public key on the desktop.
The following steps detail how you can upload the public key to a public server. Your sources will be able to retrieve your public key from these servers.
- Open the PGP public key we exported earlier with Notepad
- Visit https://sks-keyservers.net/i. Select the 'Submit a Key to the Server' option.
- Paste the public key from Notepad into the box as shown. Click on the 'Submit this key to the keyserver!' button.
- If everything did go well, you should see the following message
Wait a few minutes before you move on to the following steps. We will extract the URL where your information sources can retrieve your public key.
- Visit https://sks-keyservers.net/i again and now select the 'Extract a Key from the Server' option. Enter your email address in the search box.
- Your PGP key should be listed on the results page. Verify whether the fingerprints match with the one in Kleopatra
- Click on the link on the results page, which should retrieve the full public key
Copy the URL from the URL bar (https://sks-keyservers.net/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x72975CBAC94D4ED5 in my case)
Visit your Twitter profile to publish the URL and the fingerprint in your Twitter Bio.
- Add the URL to the Bio as shown first
- Now copy the last 16 digits of your fingerprint and add them to the Bio as well
- Save the results, your Twitter profile now should feature the necessary details to retrieve and verify your PGP public key
Edit your email signature to feature both the download URL and your PGP fingerprint. In my case, I added them to Thunderbird.
Feel free to publish the URL and the fingerprint at the end of your articles, so your readers will know how to contact you in a secure manner.