I am currently using BouncyCastle PGP in a Java application to read a public key from a string, and encrypt a file using that key. Loading the key...
Security.addProvider(new BouncyCastleProvider());
InputStream keyIn = new ByteArrayInputStream(publicKey.getBytes());
PGPPublicKeyRingCollection pgpKeyRing = new PGPPublicKeyRingCollection(PGPUtil.getDecoderStream(keyIn), new JcaKeyFingerpringCalculator());
PGPPublicKey = pgpKeyRing.getKeyRings().next().getPublicKey();
The output file is able to be decrypted with
gpg --decrypt file.gpg
even though gpg --list-keys and gpg --list-secret-keys is empty
How is this possible? Is it reading a keyring from somewhere else possibly? I am on CentOS 7, and I have deleted ~/.gnupg and re-created it.
I have also tried changing the public key I am using to encrypt to, and it still decrypts.
As it turns out, my code had an error in it, and was writing out an Ascii armored version of the PGP Compressed file, but not Encrypted. As it would happen, gpg --decrypt will decompress this file, even if there are no keys in the keyring, because it never does a check. gpg --debug-level 9 was useful to figure this out.