Hi. I booted up my TAILS USB today to complete some orders, but when I tried to decrypt the PGP message on Nucleus for 2-FA, I got an error message stating that the private key to decrypt the message had not been found.
Thinking I may have not copied the whole text, I proceeded to select and copy the text three more times to be sure. Then I tried encrypting a short message, only to find no public keys to encrypt with. I opened the Key Management interface to find everything except for "Root CA Certificates" whiped completely clean. Not a single Public key or Key pair.
I tried re-booting to no avail, and then made sure that I hadn't somehow de-selected PGP Keys as a part of my persistent volume. It is still selected.
I was logged on ~24 hours ago, and the only thing that I've done differently than most times is carry my Tails USB on me for one day. I didn't even mean to, I just left the castle with it in my pocket. I didn't do anything particularly strenuous, and didn't get it wet. I can not think of a single reason why this may have occured. Please advise.
PS: I have a backup of all of my sensitive data, of course, and will sign a message when I get it up and running. I keep the backup in a place outside of my house, and I won't have access to it until tomorrow. But my concern here lies in the fact that only one type of data was somehow completely removed from my inactive USB drive. All other data, including documents and pictures saved in my persistence is still available.
Your GPG keyring may have become corrupted.
Try this:
Boot Tails and enable persistence.
Start a command line terminal window. (Black box on the top left menu bar.)
Type the following commands:
(You will get the following error with the above command: "mv: cannot move '0bak' to a subdirectory of itself, '0bak/0bak'". It is safe to ignore.)
Should return with this:
gpg: keyring `/home/amnesia/.gnupg/secring.gpg' created
gpg: keyring `/home/amnesia/.gnupg/pubring.gpg' created
gpg: /home/amnesia/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
Try the gpgApplet clipboard icon to see if it works.
gpg --import pubring.gpg
gpg -k (lower case k)
Did it import your saved public keys?
Check the gpgApplet to make sure it is still working.