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encryptionpgp

What is at the end of PGP blob?

I am trying to decrypt a portion of an email that is encrypted with PGP. In the examples I looked at, the end of the encrypted data had an "===" then some characters. Are they part of the format?

Example vNg===eWY7

Solution

  • It seems there is a newline character missing in-between the second and third equal sign. The message should be ending somewhat like this:

    vNg==
=eWY7

    The first two (it might be zero to two, depending on the encrypted input) equal signs are used as padding for the ASCII-armoring, as stated in section 6.3 of RFC 4880.

    The third (last) equal sign introduces the checksum, es described in section 6.