Can't decrypt my passwords: gpg: decryption failed: No secret key

Milan Andric mandric at gmail.com
Sun Feb 2 23:32:48 CET 2020


Going a bit further, does anyone have a good link/guide to managing
passwords and backups in a secure way?  Because even once you have your gpg
password in human memory you still need to back it up, likely redundant
cold storage (paper?), and you still need to backup your encrypted files,
ideally in an automated way so you don't forget to backup.  Maybe including
an online copy (hot?) as well as redundant cold storage copy on sd cards?
It starts to get a little hairy and was wondering if anyone had pointers to
existing guides they follow potentially going through all the scenarios and
have a complete-ish password (secrets) storage and backup guide?

On Sat, Feb 1, 2020 at 7:33 AM Nuno Teixeira <ed.arrakis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Follow this instructions about pgp, simple examples and you will lear more
> about gpg.
>
>
> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-gpg-to-encrypt-and-sign-messages
>
> Csanyi Pal <csanyipal at gmail.com> escreveu no dia sábado, 1/02/2020 à(s)
> 13:17:
>
>> In my case I haven't any backup of mine GPG secret key here.
>>
>> So I removed my stored and lost passwords from password-store.
>>
>> I just initialize this password-store with the command:
>> pass init csanyipa at gmail.com
>>
>> I shell store here my passwords again.
>>
>> I am just curious: can one decrypt it's password-store with command
>> which is opposite to the
>> pass init command?
>>
>> 2020. 02. 01. 10:53 keltezéssel, Emil Lundberg írta:
>> > If you have a backup of your GPG secret key, you can restore that and
>> > use it to re-encrypt your passwords to the new key.
>> >
>> > If you do not have a backup, your encrypted passwords are permanently
>> > lost. There is no way to recover them without the secret key.
>> >
>> > I'm sorry to bring the bad news, if that is the case.
>> >
>> > /Emil
>> >
>> > On Sat, 1 Feb 2020, 10:26 Csanyi Pal, <csanyipal at gmail.com
>> > <mailto:csanyipal at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> >
>> >     Hi,
>> >
>> >     I messed up my GPG secret key and password-store system here.
>> >
>> >     I do not understand how GPG works.
>> >
>> >     I removed with Seahorse my old secret key so now pass show command
>> does
>> >     not shows any passwords out there.
>> >
>> >     Eg:
>> >     pass show AvilagHalon/Telefonjaim/Telenor
>> >
>> >     gives this message.
>> >     gpg: decryption failed: No secret key
>> >
>> >     How did I get into this trouble?
>> >
>> >     I am going to change my Desktop Environment from Xfce4 to LXQt.
>> >
>> >     So when I am logged in at LXQt then I couldn't use passwords with
>> pass,
>> >     or QtPass. I do not remember why not.
>> >
>> >     Probably I removed with Seahorse the old GPG secret key so I can't
>> >     decrypt my passwords stored in password-store.
>> >
>> >     At the same time I created a new key pair with gpg and tried to use
>> >     with
>> >     it the password-store but without success.
>> >
>> >     What can I do now to get my passwords back?
>> >
>> >     --
>> >     Best, Paul Chany
>>
>>
>> --
>> Best, Paul Chany
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