GPG ASCII Armor Explained | Generated by AI
In GPG (GNU Privacy Guard), “armor” refers to ASCII armor, a format that encodes binary OpenPGP data (like encrypted files, signatures, or keys) into a human-readable, text-based representation. This is useful for transmitting data over text-only channels, such as email, without corruption—similar to how uuencode or base64 works, but with added headers (e.g., “—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—–”) and checksums for integrity.
You can enable it with the --armor (or -a) option during commands like encryption (gpg -a -e file.txt) or key export (gpg --armor --export keyid), which outputs the result in this armored text format instead of raw binary.
References
- What is the armored option for in GnuPG?
- Exchanging keys - GnuPG
- 13. ASCII armor - Notes on OpenPGP
- GPG Input and Output (Using the GNU Privacy Guard)