J. Hannemann
The GNU Privacy Guard is the most powerful public key encryption program freely available today. You can use it to ensure both privacy and integrity of data you transmit via email. I won't go into details here since there are a lot of places on the Internet where people explain about that much better than I ever could. However, think of GnuPG as a means to wrap an envelope around your email and to attach a signature to it.
GnuPG keys consist of two parts, a private and a public key. I can use my private key to sign any message I write and you are able to check the authenticity of this document with my public key. On the other hand, if you encrypt a message to me with my public key, I - and only I - will be able to decrypt the message with my private key. The private key is only known to me, whereas my public key is freely available (hence the term "Public Key Encryption").
There are a lot of good reasons to use cryptography, even if you're not a criminal. The easiest way to see this is to ask yourself, whether you'd use postcards instead of letters for all of your personal and business communication (including things like credit card bills, love letters, etc.). If you think that this is OK, then GnuPG isn't for you. But be sure to read this very nice article titled " Why do you need PGP?" by Phil Zimmerman, the original author of PGP, the original and more widespread public key encryption program.
This will ask the public key server nearest to you to print out my public key. You can then easily add the key to your public key ring.
To check the authenticity of the key you just retrieved from the server, you are strongly recommended to contact me via a different channel than email (preferably face to face) to validate the key's fingerprint. This makes sure that no one has put a faked key onto the server.
The key server's output should show 4E 3F 29 2D 59 77 B3 6A E0 C9 58 D5 41 C0 4B 68 DD EF 89 4A as my key fingerprint.
This will output a list of persons that have signed my key and therefore certify my key's authenticity.
|
25. April 2004
J. Hannemann |
Standard Disclaimer |
|
|
|