Hi there
I was given to understand that public keys were used by people to encrypt messages and that they are decrypted using a private key.When i added freshrpms as a repository for a friend who has linpus linux lite(based on fedora 8)They said i needed a public GPG key.
Why do i need the keys used to sign the packages if public keys are used to encrypt messages?.
Also at freshrpms it says to download the RPM-GPG-KEY-freshrpms then do:
All i did was something like:
and things worked.
Was there an error in my proceedure?.Are there security problems that could arise from me doing other than they said at fresh rpms?. If so what?.If what i did was imcomplete what does it mean in terms of what is missing and what i should do next? What should i do next when advise him on repos and stuff?.What is the command to download RPM-GPG-KEY-freshrpms?.
Do the other default repositories on linpus need public keys downloading and importing too?
Sorry for so many questions but i'm new to pulic keys and encryption so any answers would be great.Thank you for your time

The (repos) public key is used to verify the signature on the packages by the repo's private key.

At some point, you're suppose to validate the fingerprint on the repo's public key. The only way to do that is to view what the repo says is the fingerprint, over a secure connection (ssl) to the repo's site (otherwise it could be tampered with in transit). Another way, is to trust someone else's signature on the key (that has done the validation for you) but that typically doesn't happen in a case like this. (I'm just sayin).

At some point when you install some packages, you'll get a prompt to validate the keys fingerprint...

P.S. In case I didnt use enough parentheses, here's some more().