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Now the key pair is generated by a program that spawns random numbers and that is, among other factors, fed with the activity data of the system. So it is a good idea to start some programs now, to move the mouse cursor or to type some random characters in a terminal window. That way, the chances to generate a number that contains lots of different digits will be much bigger and the key will be more difficult to crack.
9.4.3. About your key
When your key has been created, you will get a message about the fingerprint. This is a sequence of 40 hexadecimal numbers, which is so long that it is very, very hard to generate the same key twice, on any computer. You can be rather sure that this is a unique sequence. The short form of this key consists of your name, followed by the last 8 hexadecimal numbers.
You can get information about your key as follows:
willy@ubuntu:~$ gpg --list-keys
/home/willy/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
------------------------------ pub 1024D/BF5C3DBB 2006-08-08
uid Willy De Wandel (Willem) <[email protected]> sub 4096g/A3449CF7 2006-08-08
willy@ubuntu:~$ gpg --list-keys
/home/willy/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
------------------------------ pub 1024D/BF5C3DBB 2006-08-08
uid Willy De Wandel (Willem) <[email protected]> sub 4096g/A3449CF7 2006-08-08
The key ID of this key is "BF5C3DBB". You can send your key ID and your name to a key server, so that other people can get this info about you and use it to encrypt data for you. Alternatively, you can send your public key directly to the people who need it. The public part of your key is the long series of numbers that you see when using the --export option to the gpg command: