Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

Using private and public keys for asymmetric encryption and signing

Symmetric encryption is great if you're just using GPG locally for your own stuff, but what if you want to share an encrypted file with someone, while ensuring that they can decrypt it? With symmetric encryption, you'd need to find a secure way to transmit the passphrase for the file to the file's recipient. In doing so, there will always be the risk that some third party could intercept the passphrase, and could then get into your stuff. Here's where asymmetric encryption comes to the rescue. To demonstrate, I'm going to create a file, encrypt it, and send it to my buddy Frank to decrypt. 

Asymmetric encryption, is, well, asymmetric. Being asymmetric means that you would ...