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I am hunting for a solution where I can send someone encrypted files and a digital certificate that allows them to open the file.
The reason for doing it this way is because:

  • I don't want to keep giving them a new password every-time I send them some newly encrypted files, and they cannot keep up with a password because of staff changes and security reasons.

I know you can encrypt files in Adobe Acrobat with a certificate but the files I am trying to encrypt are not documents, more like scripts, programs, etc.

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  • If you'd send these people a "certificate" that's reusable for decrypting files, why not just simply reuse the same password?
    – AKX
    Apr 21, 2020 at 13:46
  • They have very limited technical knowledge, I need the decryption to be transparent
    – errMSG
    Apr 21, 2020 at 14:10
  • Then you'll probably want to use, say, a zip/rar self-extracting archive that asks for the password.
    – AKX
    Apr 21, 2020 at 14:16
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    Kleopatra allows you to leave an empty passphrase when creating a gpg key (it warns you that this might not be a good idea, but allows it). In that case, no password is required when decrypting. Apr 24, 2020 at 10:18
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    Just a point of clarification: A certificate contains only a public key, which can be used to encrypt but not to decrypt. If you want to do encryption using certificates. the recipient generates their own public/private key pair, and sends you the public key (either wrapped in a certificate or just "bare"). You then encrypt to their public key, and they use the private key to decrypt. If you send somebody an encrypted file and also the certificate (but not the private key), they can't do anything with it at all!
    – CBHacking
    Sep 20, 2020 at 21:05

1 Answer 1

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Veracrypt has an option to use a keyfile instead of a password. This allows the recipient of the encrypted file to not have to keep up with a password but can use a file (which is also encrypted) to decrypt the data.

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