I just set up my PGP key on my computer. (Again, in fact, since I recently reformatted the hard drive.) You can find the (new) ASCII and binary files on the new page on my blog titled "My PGP Key".
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a well-used computer program that allows people to securely send encrypted messages to a user. This is the way it works: with some personal information, a password, and some entropy on the local computer; a user generates a public key and a private key. The private key is kept secret and is used to decrypt messages that the user received. The public key is used to encrypt messages to send to the user and is usually, well, public information. (For example, I'm posting my public key on this site.) The point is that only the private key can decrypt messages.
The free open-source version of the service, called GPG, is the actually program that I installed and configured. For an interesting look into the intricacies of modern encryption standards check out this page. It's an overview of the primary encryption algorithms, recommended configurations, hash functions, and more.
17 January 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment