The KMyMoney recovery key

KMyMoney has the ability to encrypt your data using GPG. Besides using your own key for encryption, KMyMoney supports the ability to encrypt your data with a recover key only available to the core developers.

This key will have no effect if you always have access to your own key, but if you lose your key or the passphrase for it, the KMyMoney recover key comes in handy as now the core developers can help you to recover your financial data. The only thing you have to do upfront is to encrypt your data with the recover key. If you don’t do that, There is nothing we can do to help you.

For the second time I received an email with a request for help to decrypt a KMyMoney data encrypted with GPG where the user has lost his/her GPG-Key(ring). Unfortunately, in both cases KMyMoney’s recover key feature had not been used and I could not recover the data. If I had the ability to help in these cases (without the recover key) it would mean that I can successfully break any GPG encryption. Trust me, this is not the case.

The only thing that allows me to help a user in this situation is the KMyMoney recover key. Using this feature, you encrypt your data with your key and the recover key. In case you lose yours, you can send me the file and I can use the secret part of the recover key pair to decrypt it. I will ask you some questions about the contents of the file to make sure that the person who sends me the file is the legal owner of the file. You will also have to provide me with your new (public) key, which I will use to encrypt the file to send it back to you. This way, your data is never travelling the internet in readable form.

BTW: I encrypt my data using my own key (the same I use to sign all my e-mails) and the recover key just for this purpose. I have stored a printed copy of the recover key as well as a CD containing it in a safe at my bank. This way, I can always reconstruct it and it is not getting lost.

Now, don’t ever tell me you have not used the recover key feature… you have been warned.

Import the key into your GPG keyring before you can use it inside KMyMoney. Select encryption against this key in the Security settings dialog. Save your data. That’s it.

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Comment: http://www.net-bembel.de/

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