pgp encryption

[inittux]

I just came across a topic I never really thought much of, but then I started playing around

with it and it was quite fun. I now have my thunderbird setup using pgp encryption, so I can

send encrypted emails. I thought it was quite fun to play with, I mostly understand it now.

I thought of making a how to here but the explanation/how to I found on the internet couldn't have

been written better in my opinion that is. Check it here

I'm just wondering how many people here use pgp encryption?

[Dungeon-Dave]

Many years ago, a work colleague gave me a utility that encrypted/decrypted emails so she and I could pass sensitive information around without the (then) mail admins seeing it. The utility was a simple windows-based app, developed by her boyfriend - this was before PGP privacy came around but the key used to encrypt was also used to decrypt, so wasn't a private/public pair like PGP uses.

 

Apart from email and some browsing, pretty much anything else I do is over encrypted streams: WPA for wireless at home and work, SSH into my servers, SFTP to copy files back and forth and HTTPS for my sites that require authentication. I'm not completely secure - anyone could sniff the traffic and attempt to break the encryption - but it means casual sniffers can't just suck plain-text out of the air and find my sensitive information amongst the low-hanging fruit.

 

It's a pity that encrypted SMTP isn't commonplace, but I honestly can't see how it could work. For the moment, PGP on the client is probably the safest bet.

 

You may also want to look up encrypted filesystems for another project.

[inittux]

Good idea :)I did recently reinstall my pc and made LVM groups and encrypted the LVM groups and my / /home partition. I understand how to do it but

not really how it works. Probably useful to understand how file system encryption works in order to protect my system :)