Home / Questions / 187970
Accepted
akko
Asked: 2020-08-11 14:35:15 +0800 CST 2020-08-11 14:35:15 +0800 CST

How to encrypt and decrypt a password protected file using PGP?

  • 772

Assuming I have a text file called prueba.txt.

Hola

And I encrypt it with GPG as follows:

$ gpg -c prueba.txt

This asks me for a password and then generates the prueba.txt.gpg. Now if you wanted to decrypt the file you would have to do the following:

$ gpg --decrypt prueba.txt.gpg

Which should ask me for the password of the file so it can decrypt it, but it doesn't. It just decrypts it without any password.

linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This may be normal behavior, gpgnow used gpg-agentto manage private keys, and the agent caches the keys for a certain time (up to two hours by default, with a ten minute idle time). Which means that during that time you will not be asked for the password to decrypt.

    To change the default values, create or edit a file called ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.confand use the following inputs:

    • default-cache-ttlspecifies the amount of time a cache entry is kept after its last use, in seconds ( 600default);
    • max-cache-ttlspecifies the maximum amount of time a cache entry is kept, in seconds ( 7200default).

    After changing them, you'll need to reload the config (try sending a SIGHUPto gpg-agent, or killing it directly with kill gpg-agent).

    Source: gpg does not ask for password

    • 4