Securing email, the realm of pgp encryption
In an ever changeing world in which identity theft is becoming common place and more and more personal information is being exchanged across the internet. The need to secure transaction becomes a very high priority. Que entrance: Cryptography. Its the ultimate solution to security, to display sensitive information in a seamingly meaningless form to "outsiders", and still retain meaning and content to the select "insiders". Todays post concerns a supriseingly insecure mode of interaction, email.
PGP has become one of the most popular modes of encrypting email. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, a humble name considering there have been no reported instances in which it has been cracked, and was developed in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann. However today the (original) technology is corprately owned. But not to worry, the GNU organization has produced an open source (free) alternative.
Enough history, lets get to emplementing it. First off this requires you to have an email account which allows external access, or allows you to access mail through an email client such as Thunderbird, which coincidentally, is what I recomend you use for this project, along with the EnigMail plugin, and finally the last thing you will need to install is a PGP package, you have a choice of using the corporate PGP [owned by McAfee] version or OpenPG [distributed by GNU]
After succesfully installing the above mentioned software, you will want to set the pgp executable path in EnigMail (this of course should be in the direcotry which you sintalled your pgp software to). Next you can create your encryption key pair and export you're public key for distribution to friends/clients (thus enabling them to send encrypted messages to you).
For more info and in depth reading:
PGP has become one of the most popular modes of encrypting email. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, a humble name considering there have been no reported instances in which it has been cracked, and was developed in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann. However today the (original) technology is corprately owned. But not to worry, the GNU organization has produced an open source (free) alternative.
Enough history, lets get to emplementing it. First off this requires you to have an email account which allows external access, or allows you to access mail through an email client such as Thunderbird, which coincidentally, is what I recomend you use for this project, along with the EnigMail plugin, and finally the last thing you will need to install is a PGP package, you have a choice of using the corporate PGP [owned by McAfee] version or OpenPG [distributed by GNU]
After succesfully installing the above mentioned software, you will want to set the pgp executable path in EnigMail (this of course should be in the direcotry which you sintalled your pgp software to). Next you can create your encryption key pair and export you're public key for distribution to friends/clients (thus enabling them to send encrypted messages to you).
For more info and in depth reading:
posted by dcsimon @ 7:35 PM
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