Public keys

Your public keys

Your public PGP key is the part of your key pair you share freely so that others can encrypt messages to you or verify your signed messages. Your key pair is automatically generated when you sign up at Private.Ki.

For sending internal encrypted messages (to another Private.Ki user), you don't need to do anything. Your public key is shared automatically, and all internal messages (within Private.Ki) are automatically encrypted. The email content is encrypted with PGP, metadata is encrypted with AES.

If you'd like to exchange emails with someone outside of of Private.Ki and encrypt these emails, the recipient needs your public key, and you need the recipient's public key.

Here's how you share your public key to external (non-Private.Ki email addresses):

Sharing your public key by email

To share your key by email, start writing an email to the recipient to whom you want to send your public key. Click on the 3 dots menu at the bottom of the compose window:

Click on Attach public key:

After that, you can send your email by clicking Send.

Your PGP public key is attached to this email, and the recipient can import it with his email/PGP software. After that, you can receive encrypted emails from him.

It's 100% safe to share your public key. This does not leak any sensible information. It only contains your email address, nothing more. The only thing that someone can do with your public key is sending you an encrypted email.

There is no way that you accidentally share your secret key like this - we don't have that option, it's impossible.

Sharing your public key as a file

You can also download your public key as an .asc file to share it manually, put it on your website, or similar.

In your Private.Ki account, go to Settings:

Click on Key Management:

Click on Export Public Key:

Your key will now be automatically downloaded in your browser's download folder as an .asc file. Feel free to share it with anybody or publish it anywhere.

Public keys of others

In order to send an encrypted email to a recipient outside of Private.Ki, you need to import their PGP public key into your Private.Ki account.

Automatic import of keys sent to you by email

If somebody sends you a PGP public key as an email attachment to your Private.Ki email address, we detect it automatically and give you the option to import it:

Click on Import, and the key will be automatically imported:

After that, you can easily send an encrypted email to the email address associated with this key.

Manual import of PGP public key files

If you have somebody's PGP public key as a file on your device, you can import it manually to your Private.Ki account.

Navigate to Settings:

Click Click on Key Management:

Click on Import:

The key import window opens:

Now enter the email address that belongs to the public key that you'd like to import, and either paste or upload the file with the key:

Then, click on Import.

After successful import, the confirmation looks like this:

After that, you can easily send an encrypted email to the email address associated with this key.