Revoking a GPG key

January 18th, 2004  |  Published in misc  |  5 Comments

A couple of months ago, I lost my lovely laptop in a burglary. This weekend, Edd reminded me that my GPG private key was on the machine, so I performed the necessary rituals to revoke it. I found the documentation on this a little sparse, so here are the steps I took.

$ gpg --gen-revoke 6382285E

6382285E is the ID for my key. You’re asked if you want to provide a reason for the revocation (key comprised, superseded or no longer used) and an optional free-text description. After supplying your passphrase, an ascii-armoured key block is printed out. Paste this text into a file. In my case, it looked like this:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: A revocation certificate should follow

iGwEIBECACwFAkAKbmwlHQJLZXkgd2FzIG9uIGEgbGFwdG9wIHRoYXQgd2FzIHN0
b2xlbgAKCRBQw2pwY4IoXlv4AJ0XgWhSuSwv2jpd2ifFA5IXyijnEACfXfn/qtfq
KyMdShD0odXAliKD43w=
=mRL+
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

This step could be performed when you first generate your key, and the results stashed in a safe place for later use if you lose it. In my case, I’d kept a backup copy of the original keypair, so I was able to generate a revocation after the event.

$ gpg --import my_revocation.txt

Issuing this command imports the revocation into your keyring, revoking your key.

$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-keys 6382285E

This send the revoked key to the public keyserver at pgp.mit.edu. If it succeeds, you’ll get the message ‘gpg: success sending to `pgp.mit.edu' (status=200)‘. If you check your key’s verbose index page on pgp.mit.edu, you’ll see *** KEY REVOKED *** on the first line of the details.

For the record, my new key has the ID 097891DA.

Update: I just found the official word on how to do this. It’s in question 4.17 of the gpg faq.

Responses

  1. Earle Martin says:

    February 17th, 2004 at 5:42 pm (#)

    I have a couple (at least) of old keys floating around out there somewhere that I wasn’t able to revoke and for which the 53kr3tz are irretrievably lost. Annoyance!

  2. PhLo says:

    December 4th, 2008 at 9:24 pm (#)

    Thank you for this wonderfully easy howto which was the first thing I found after sucesslessly trying to revoke my lost key for about 30 minutes

  3. jon says:

    January 15th, 2009 at 4:15 pm (#)

    http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/documentation/faqs.ht

    It's a 404.

  4. mattbiddulph says:

    January 15th, 2009 at 4:25 pm (#)

    Fixed, thanks.

  5. Basti says:

    January 22nd, 2009 at 12:11 am (#)

    Will all the attributes(like photos) deleted by the keyserver?