On Thursday 25 February 2010 01:09:53 pm Andrew McNabb wrote: > Let's turn this discussion in a productive direction. How do we > actually get email to be encrypted? I would love to have all of my > incoming and outgoing emails be encrypted, but how can I actually do > this? Remember that most people will never use GPG.
GPG/PGP uses SSL-style encryption but without the central CA. Details vary by platform and email client, but you create a key pair for yourself. Then you give the other party your public key. You then use the private key to encrypt the email, which is sent as a mime-encoded encrypted message. The other side uses your public key to decrypt it and they can read it. I use Kmail and Kmail allows you to import your PGP/GPG key. Then I have two buttons at the top of my message window: sign and encrypt. Sign will attach a hash to the body of the email to verify it was not modified. Encrypt will garble the entire message. In order for you to receive encrypted email, the sender has to encrypt it and they need to provide you with the public key to decrypt it. Yes, it's kind of a mess, since it is all ad-hoc. However, that's the only way to do it. Anything else would be less secure. -- Alberto Treviño BYU Testing Center Brigham Young University -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
