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You need to decide four things prior to creating your keys - your passphrase, to use your real name or
a nic, to enter a comment or not and which email address you want to assign to the keys.
Passphrase
This should be secure and yet easy to remember. Secure in the sense that it can't be easily
guessed but something familiar to you only. Try to combine numbers and letters (alphanumeric), uppercase and lowercase. "Dog" for example
would not be a good choice. It can be easily guessed and names or words can be found out by a brute-force attack relatively
quickly. So the more you mix alphanumeric characters in upper and lowercase the more secure your encryption will be. There is
no limit to the number of characters you can use. 8 to 10 well-selected characters could be considered very good for our purposes.
Which by the way, this key set should only be used for the Agoracart functions and not published as a public key. Create a
second key set if you wish to publish a public key. Never publish the private key in any case!
Some passphrase bad examples:
Never use - your name, divers license, social security number! telephone number, address, etc.
Plain words - dog, cat, geek, etc.
Sequential numbers/letters - abc123, 567abc, 890, dog123, 123dog
Very short passphrase - like some people just enter 1 for a passphrase for ease. Do not do this!
Do not use the same passphrase (password) as you use for every login you have on the net and on your pc. Use something unique.
Some better examples:
Random is best but words can be used if done properly.
Words and numbers - 92JinKs98, 921BiLlY4, 8M7y3N6a9M0e
Alphanumeric - 4k55DA9q, MM95w63X
Something to consider is as you become accustomed to entering the passphrase to decrypt your email it will become as familiar as your
phone number providing you use a human recognizable rhythm to the passphrase.
Real Name
To use your real name or a nic such as your company name is a personal preference. Either is OK for our purposes.
E-Mail Address
You Probably should use the E-Mail account to which you will be receiving the encrypted E-Mail.
Comment
You will see an opportunity to enter a comment. This is not required and I personally don't use one.
Decide which values you want for the above and write them down for reference during setup.
Creating GnuPG Keys Part Two
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Tutorials
