Installing GnuPG – Your open-source software companion to encrypt/decrypt files for your Power Platform Integrations

What’s GnuPG?

GnuPG is a complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard. GnuPG allows you to encrypt and sign your data and communications; it features a versatile key management system, along with access modules for all kinds of public key directories. GPG can use both symmetric and asymmetric encryption to encrypt and decrypt.

So, now let’s talk about the tool Gpg4Win. Gpg4win is an email and file encryption package for most versions of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Outlook, which utilizes the GnuPG framework for symmetric and public-key cryptography, such as data encryption, digital signatures, hash calculations etc. It’s open source and a free tool, it has been widely used by many of the encryption implementations. So, let’s see how you can install a GnuPG Software.

You can navigate to this GnuPG Download link of the official download page. You can download the latest version, as of writing this blog Gpg4Win 4.2.0 is the latest.

Gpg4win 4.2.0 contains mainly, rest of the components aren’t of interest for this blog:

1.GnuPG 2.4.3 : Actual software used to encrypt and decrypt.

2. Kleopatra 3.1.28: Kleopatra is a certificate manager and GUI for GnuPG, it stores all your certificates and keys.

Choose $0 and proceed to download which now

This now downloads the Gpg4Win software. So once click and start your installation, choose the necessary components required.

You can proceed to select only GnuPG, Kleopatra or both, which installs only GnuPG command line and/or Kleopatra which is a windows utility.

If you choose not to install Kleopatra, it’s ok, you still be able to encrypt and decrypt but only using command line, but if you have Kleopatra, you can use GUI for encryption or decryption.

Once you have installed GnuPG, just open Command Prompt, start entering gpg..

You can also check the root folder where all your Key rings will be stored…

With gpg is now set up in your PC, you will be able to encrypt and decrypt using gpg command line scripts.

Ok, now everything is good, how about if other persons when logged into this PC, will they be able to use the gpg commands to encrypt or decrypt, of course not, for this you need to follow as below…

All you need to set an environment variable which is of scope user and set the home location for gpg to look for keys in that machine.

Once you have set this, the home location of gpg is now changed, so any user who have access to this path can be able to encrypt or decrypt without issues.

You check the modified location by using this command

I hope you have learned something…In the next few blog posts, we will see how you can encrypt and decrypt files using gpg command line utility being called from C#. Any questions do let me know in comments….

Happy Integrating Power Platform with 3rd party Applications.

Cheers,

PMDY

Author: Pavan Mani Deep Y

Technology geek who loves sharing my leanings, quick tips and new features on Dynamics 365 & related tools, technologies. An Azure IOT Enthusiast….
View all posts by Pavan Mani Deep Y

This post was originally published on this site