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Friday, June 3, 2011
How To Encrypt Email
SecurityProNews.com
How To Encrypt Email
By: Joe Purcell
Previously we had discussed how to how to make a solid password, an overview of how encryption works, and how to encrypt data. Email privacy is a growing concern and in the last part of this series of articles we will discuss how to encrypt emails.
Intro
All email encryption programs use public-key cryptography (as does OpenSSH) which applies an asymmetric key algorithm. Public and private keys are made, the former to produce an encrypted message that only the latter can read (decrypt). It is essentially impossible to derive the private key from the public key, so sharing the public key in a non-secretive way is not of grave concern, though certainly keeping the public key in only sure hands would add an additional level of security. PGP was initially released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann for Windows, but was later published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a standard named OpenPGP.
There are many great solutions for email encryption, and most (if not all) are based on the OpenPGP standard. Lifehacker explains how to use Enigmail, and there is a commercial version of PGP offered by Symantec. For Apple Mail there is an encrypt program, and there is a FirefoxGreasemonkey script for Gmail. There are certainly many others, but here we will look at GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), which is a very popular implementation of OpenPGP, to offer a possible solution and to show the basic idea of how public key encryption works.
Step 1 - Install
Installing the program, whether it be on of the many GUI'sor the command line interface, should be fairly straightforward.
Step 2 - Create a Public Key
For the sake of the example, let's say Bob and Jim want to send encrypted emails back and forth. Both Bob and Jim create their own public key by the following:
gpg --gen-key
Follow the steps, using RSA and RSA (meaning RSA public key and RSA private key) and 2048 bit keys. The passphrase will need to be very long, so initially enter as long of a passphrase you can remember, and then if it says "Not enough random bytes available," then bang on the keyboard for a while until it's happy. Then export your public key to share:
Continue reading this article.
| Thursday:06.02.11 |
By: Joe Purcell Previously we had discussed how to how to make a solid password, an overview of how encryption works, and how to encrypt data. Email privacy is a growing concern and in the last part of this series of articles we will discuss how to encrypt emails.
Intro
All email encryption programs use public-key cryptography (as does OpenSSH) which applies an asymmetric key algorithm. Public and private keys are made, the former to produce an encrypted message that only the latter can read (decrypt). It is essentially impossible to derive the private key from the public key, so sharing the public key in a non-secretive way is not of grave concern, though certainly keeping the public key in only sure hands would add an additional level of security. PGP was initially released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann for Windows, but was later published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a standard named OpenPGP.
There are many great solutions for email encryption, and most (if not all) are based on the OpenPGP standard. Lifehacker explains how to use Enigmail, and there is a commercial version of PGP offered by Symantec. For Apple Mail there is an encrypt program, and there is a FirefoxGreasemonkey script for Gmail. There are certainly many others, but here we will look at GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), which is a very popular implementation of OpenPGP, to offer a possible solution and to show the basic idea of how public key encryption works.
Step 1 - Install
Installing the program, whether it be on of the many GUI'sor the command line interface, should be fairly straightforward.
Step 2 - Create a Public Key
For the sake of the example, let's say Bob and Jim want to send encrypted emails back and forth. Both Bob and Jim create their own public key by the following:
gpg --gen-key
Follow the steps, using RSA and RSA (meaning RSA public key and RSA private key) and 2048 bit keys. The passphrase will need to be very long, so initially enter as long of a passphrase you can remember, and then if it says "Not enough random bytes available," then bang on the keyboard for a while until it's happy. Then export your public key to share:
Continue reading this article.
| About the Author: Joe Purcell is a technology virtuoso, cyberspace frontiersman, and connoisseur of Linux, Mac, and Windows alike. |
