this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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Privacy
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It should be if there is chunks missing its unusable. At least thats my thinking, since gpg is usually a binary and ascii armor makes it human readable. As long as a person cannot guess the blacked out parts, there shouldnt be any data.
Kinda like binary if your missing bits of binary in a program it should be unreadable
--edit
im full of shit Its base64 and you can somewhat decode it
you are mistaken. A PGP key is a binary structure which includes the metadata. PGP's "ascii-armor" means base64-encoding that binary structure (and putting the BEGIN and END header lines around it). One can decode fragments of a base64-encoded string without having the whole thing. To confirm this, you can use a tool like
xxd
(orhexdump
) - try pasting half of your ascii-armored key in tobase64 -d | xxd
(and hit enter and ctrl-D to terminate the input) and you will see the binary structure as hex and ascii - including the key metadata. i think either half will do, as PGP keys typically have their metadata in there at least twice.Yeah i realized this after i got to work and lookup up what gpg uses for ascii armor. Its base64, i used base64 -d and i could get some parts of my key. The photo has been updated to remove alot more of the key.
Major fuckup on my part.
But i learned that ASCII armor is base64 i guess.