sq-toolbox - Man Page

Manage collections of keys or certs.

Collections of keys or certificates (also known as "keyrings" when they contain secret key material, and "certrings" when they don't) are any number of concatenated certificates.  This subcommand provides tools to list, split, merge, and filter keyrings.

Note: In the documentation of this subcommand, we sometimes use the terms keys and certs interchangeably.

Convert a key to a cert.

After generating a key, use this command to get the certificate corresponding to the key.  The key must be kept secure, while the certificate should be handed out to correspondents, e.g. by uploading it to a key server.

Low-level packet manipulation.

An OpenPGP data stream consists of packets.  These tools allow working with packet streams.  They are mostly of interest to developers, but `sq toolbox packet dump` may be helpful to a wider audience both to provide valuable information in bug reports to OpenPGP-related software, and as a learning tool.

Convert binary to ASCII.

To make encrypted data easier to handle and transport, OpenPGP data can be transformed to an ASCII representation called ASCII Armor.  sq emits armored data by default, but this subcommand can be used to convert existing OpenPGP data to its ASCII-encoded representation.

The converse operation is `sq toolbox dearmor`.

Convert ASCII to binary.

To make encrypted data easier to handle and transport, OpenPGP data can be transformed to an ASCII representation called ASCII Armor.  sq transparently handles armored data, but this subcommand can be used to explicitly convert existing ASCII-encoded OpenPGP data to its binary representation.

The converse operation is `sq toolbox armor`.

First, generate a key

    sq key generate --userid '<juliet@example.org>' \
    --output juliet.key.pgp

Then, extract the certificate for distribution

    sq toolbox extract-cert --output juliet.cert.pgp juliet.key.pgp

Convert a binary certificate to ASCII

    sq toolbox armor binary-juliet.pgp

Convert a binary message to ASCII

    sq toolbox armor binary-message.pgp

Convert a ASCII certificate to binary

    sq toolbox dearmor ascii-juliet.pgp

Convert a ASCII message to binary

    sq toolbox dearmor ascii-message.pgp