Re: PGP: difference between Kleopatra and Kgpg, both from KDE
Marco Möller wrote:
> Could someone explain for a raw beginner concerning the usage of PGP the
> difference between Kleopatra and Kgpg, what the typical work case is for
> the one and the other, what important feature the one and the other is
> missing?
>
apt-cache show kleopatra
Description-en: Certificate Manager and Unified Crypto GUI
Kleopatra is a certificate manager and a universal crypto GUI. It supports
managing X.509 and OpenPGP certificates in the GpgSM keybox and retrieving
certificates from LDAP servers.
Description-md5: e5d6fc989907b80b691c99f2d8834cf5
Homepage: https://www.kde.org/applications/utilities/kleopatra/
apt-cache show kgpg
Description-en: graphical front end for GNU Privacy Guard
Kgpg manages cryptographic keys for the GNU Privacy Guard, and can encrypt,
decrypt, sign, and verify files. It features a simple editor for applying
cryptography to short pieces of text, and can also quickly apply
cryptography
to the contents of the clipboard.
.
This package is part of the KDE Utilities module.
Description-md5: c2c30394bb363998b52a8fcc2caeb33c
Homepage: http://www.kde.org/
>
> Sorry for the related but low specific questions in the following. Being
> a raw beginner in the topic of PGP signing of email messages, it is
> difficult to even know what exactly to ask for. My internet search
> engine of choice and the KDE web sites both unfortunately did not guide
> me to a nice reading about the differences of Kleopatra and Kgpg, and
> adding Thunderbird to this does not make the topic easier to grasp.
> Therefore please allow me to add the following complex of questions:
> The background to my questions is, that I am aiming to soon use PGP
> signatures when working with Thunderbird, but I would not know if
> Kleopatra or if Kpgp would be better suited to support this. Besides, as
> a raw beginner in the topic of PGP, I am not even sure right now if I
> might find good usage of PGP for whatever else in the future (maybe
> authentication for a ssh access?), and if for this I should right away
> start to get comfortable with the one or the other tool, Kleopatra or
> Kpgp, or if anyway both will be needed because they target different
> work cases or complement each other?
I think the above parts of the package description explains quite well the
use cases.
With kleopatra you manage certificates in KDE (such like SSL)
With Kgpg you manage GPG keys and you can encrypt/decrypt GUI style text
> At the moment my impression is that Thunderbird even comes with its own
> PGP implementation and is not using any other PGP parts of the rest of
> my Debian? Will Kleopatra or Kpgp then be of any help for me at all
> right now?
Don't know thunderbird or it's ability to use GPG, but it makes sense that
it uses it's own implementation. The answer here is probably no.
However you could use Kgpg to create and manage your keys and keyring (I
would recommend it)
> I find package "gnupg" (maybe for the package manager apt to work
> fine?), but no package which in its package name would explicitly
> contain the word openpgp. Is there a special openpgp package which I
> should install in order to get well prepared for a typical PGP future?
gnupg is the mother of all open source pgp stuff. In fact you must know that
PGP is the commercial implementation of a standard for symetric encryption
(I hope I am not wrong in my wording while citing from memory)
Gnupg is the opensource equivalent of PGP and it is great :) command line
utility and set of libraries that makes it possible to use encryption on
numerous of devices. The application is called gpg.
Kgpg is a front end to gnupg. Go to the home page of gpg and read, get
familiar to it. It definitely needs understanding before using.
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