These can be associated with a particular e-mail address, or you can choose to use this key pair with two or more e-mail addresses you might use. It’s from here that-by clicking the “Generate” option-you can create your own public and private keys. Once Thunderbird has been restarted you’ll see an “OpenPGP” menu item, and clicking this will bring you to the OpenPGP Key Management window. (Don’t skip the download stage and try to install it directly if you are running Firefox or your browser will try to install Enigmail into itself instead of Thunderbird.) The GPG plug-in for Thunderbird is called Enigmail, which you can download from Enigmail’s download page and then install into the e-mail client. The next step is to find a GPG plug-in for the e-mail client you intend to use: In this article we’ll use the open-source Thunderbird 2 e-mail client, although plug-ins of varying quality are available for many more clients including Eudora and Outlook Express on Windows, Thunderbird, KMail and Evolution on Linux, and Thunderbird and Mail.app on OS X. The first step to running GPG is to run the Windows installer, which you can download from GPG’s web site: /gcrypt/binary/gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe. (But like most command line tools, if you do take the time to master the commands you’ll find GPG much easier to control directly than through a front end.) ![]() GPG is actually a command line tool, but thanks to some handy plug-ins to popular e-mail clients you shouldn’t ever have to learn any of the commands. To illustrate GPG’s use I’ll concentrate on the Windows platform for the simple reason that 90 percent of all desktops and laptops run Windows-if you use another platform then the general information will still apply even of the details are slightly different. Like any open-source alternative to a commercial product there are differences between PGP Corp.’s platform and GPG in terms of support and additional features, but GPG offers solid public key encryption and key management features as an alternative to a system such as that offered by PGP Corp., on a number of platforms including Windows, Linux, UNIX and OS X. Since any OpenPGP compliant software (should) work with any other, this means that GPG is compatible with PGP. The good news is that there’s a completely free, open-source implementation of the OpenPGP standard called GNU Privacy Guard (or, more commonly, “GPG”). OpenPGP was actually derived from PGP, the pioneering public key encryption program created by Phil Zimmerman back in 1991 which is the basis for PGP Corp.’s platform. ![]() What’s interesting about this commercial platform is that it adheres to the OpenPGP standard – an e-mail encryption standard defined by the OpenPGP Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force ( IETF) Proposed Standard RFC 4880. In the business world, PGP Corp.’s public key encryption platform is the big player. There are open source encryption solutions that enable smaller companies and individuals to use the technology at no cost-most commonly to encrypt and digitally sign e-mail messages. PKE isn’t just the preserve of large organizations. One way to make sure your e-mail is free from eavesdroppers is through the use of public key encryption (PKE). Even if you’re not sending industrial secrets out in your everyday e-mail, there might be plenty of things you’d rather not have winging around in the clear.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |