Silk Road forums
Support => Technical support => Topic started by: billyprod on January 22, 2012, 11:45 am
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I have no idea how to use PGP. Is there a quick start guide? How do I use it when giving a mailing address to vendors on the order form?
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I would first get an email account at tormail.net. There you can find the .onion address for that site.
I suggest you use that email when you generate your keys (although some people just use fake emails).
Then follow this Windows guide for GPG (and make sure you check the box to install GPA when installing it. If you haven't installed GPA it can be frustrating trying to figure things out). There are also threads in the forum for other operating systems like OS X.
http://p3lr4cdm3pv4plyj.onion/guides/shepj.html
The name you use to generate your keys should be your SR name so people can easily tell whose key they're looking at.
After you've installed GPG you can open GPA by just doing Start > Run > type gpa > ok
Also, another choice is Portable PGP (http://ppgp.sourceforge.net/) which is pretty easy to use (as long as you have JRE6 installed and download the JCE6 files and extract them and copy the 2 .jar files into the program directory, or use the USB stick version). Although I've read it can't handle longer keys, like, say 4096 bits. So most people recommend GPG.
Basically to encrypt your address, start GPA, first import the vendor's public key. To do that, copy their public key on their userpage, paste it into a text file, and then import that text file into GPA (the Import button). Then go to Clipboard, type your address, click encrypt, choose the recipient (the vendor in this case), hit OK, wait for it to be encrypted, and then copy that encrypted message and paste it in the address box on SR.
Also, if you want the vendor to encrypt messages that they send back to you, include a copy of your public key, above or below the message. That can be done by selecting your key in GPA, click export, save it to a text file, and then copying and pasting onto SR.
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Oh, and if you want to test yourself to see that you understand the process and know what you're doing in GPA, you can do that here:
http://p3lr4cdm3pv4plyj.onion/test.php
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Thanks Silpheed. I have nearly done all this but having trouble with import. Have saved Tetravort's key to notepad but when I try to import get message "no keys found". any ideas? sorry to be pain.
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Got It! ;D
Don't worry1
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I recommend this program for beginners to get up and running quickly :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ppgp/