Am I supposed to be able to decrypt my message I encrypted for vendor?

So I learned all of this pgp stuff and imported my vendors pgp key. When I encrypt my message with their public key and sign as myself am I supposed to be able to decrypt my message as well, or is he the only one that can read it? I try to decrypt it to see if I did it right and it says something about "no open pgp blah blah". Thanks!


Comments


[2 Points] None:

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[2 Points] ElfenL:

Here is a really simplified explanation of how PGP works and why you can't decrypt your own message.

The way PGP works is by using a pair of keys (the public key and the private key). The public key can ONLY be used to encrypt a message, and the private key can ONLY be used to decrypt a message.

Now every text message can be translated into a number, so to encrypt our message, we translate it into a number and then perform some mathematical operation on it using the public key. As a really basic example, the mathematical operation is going to be "add" and our public key is 10. So say our message is 4, to encrypt our message we perform 4 add 10 which equals 14. 14 is now our encrypted message. With this example, it's really obvious the the private key is -10 since 14 add -10 equals 4. The magic of PGP comes by using a really special mathematical operation, one where it takes a very very very long time (I'm talking way longer than the age of the universe) to calculate the private key if you only know the public key.

Now there is one thing you can try, since with the public key you can encrypt any message, and you have an encrypted message, you can guess what you think the message was, then encrypt it, then check if the two encrypted messages are equal.


[1 Points] sapiophile:

GPG also supports encrypting to multiple recipients, and it's possible (and relatively easy) to configure a default, additional key to encrypt things to. So if it's important to you to be able to read your sent messages, you can set that up. Just be mindful of the security and privacy implications of doing that - every recipient will be able to see that you are also a recipient, although you could manually use the --hidden-recipient argument to at least conceal which additional key(s) are being used.