Your ability to decrypt old encrypted messages is not affected by revoking the key. That will raise the trustlevel for the new key.Ī revoked public key can still be used to verify signatures made by you in the past, but it cannot be used to encrypt future messages to you. It is important to get your new key signed by a few people after letting them check your identity. It is likely that the key with the newest date is the key, the key owner wants you to use. When searching for a key, the results will be presented with a creation date. When your public key resides on the key servers you cannot revoke that key and it will continue to show as valid, which is a situation we try to avoid but read on.īut how will people know, which key to use, if the old key is not revoked? Create a new key and let your friends know about the new key. If you did not upload your key to the key servers, the issue at hand is not as bad. If your key was created with GPG Suite 2013 or older and you have not manually create a revocation certificate you might be out of luck: Without the password and the secret key it is not possible to now create a revocation certificate or revoke the key. Only then, will the key servers reflect the revoked status and you don't want a revoked key to show as unrevoked! Important: If your key was uploaded to the key servers, make sure to upload the updated key. carefully read and confirm the dialog to revoke your key.open GPG Keychain and drag the cert in question into the main window.navigate to your revocation certificate in finder.

If you manually created a revocation certificate: If your public key is not in your key list and you previously uploaded it to the key servers, download it from there and proceed try above steps. right-click your public key in GPG Keychain.If your key was created with GPG Suite 2015.06 or later (released: ), a revocation certificate can be found at ~/.gnupg/RevCerts. Maybe the missing password comes to mind or you can recall, that you actually do have a key backup. But before revoking too hastily give yourself a week. If you lost your secret key or forgot your password you should revoke your key.

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