gpg for the initiate
Posted in general news on January 5th, 2008 by tetujin
so i’ve played with PGP in the past, and was completely overwhelmed and confused. for me, the tools were arcane, the documentation assumed much knowledge that i didn’t have, and wasn’t very helpful for the novice.
that was probably ten years ago. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has gone away, and in its place is GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). there are distros of GPG for pretty much every major platform, and there’s even a firefox extension to help integrate gpg into gmail, making things That Much Easier. i’ve used it a bit (though i only have three friends who use gpg at the moment), and the process isn’t as hard as i once thought, especially with the tools in the state they are today. if you’re curious, you might find it a little easier than you thought. it basically works like this:
- install GPG for your OS.
- with your newly installed software, use the key manager to create a key pair for a specific email address. this includes a private key that you never share with anyone, and a public key that you do share with everyone that you want to exchange mail with.
- get your friends’ public keys. if you want to exchange mail with people, they need to be using gpg as well. that’s the drawback. import these keys with your key manager.
- you’re now ready to encrypt things to other people! when you encode something, make sure you encode it using the public key of the person you want to send it to. that’s the mistake i made early on, and wound up encrypting a bunch of stuff with my public key that only i could unencrypt. nurrr.
fireGPG works will for firefox, and integrates some handy buttons into gmail so that you can sign, verify, encrypt, decrypt, and send — all without having to leave your browser. when i installed GPG4Win on my XPSP2 box, it dropped right in and worked like a charm. however, i also installed it on my suse 9.3 box at work. in that case, it complained of not being able to find the gpg binary, even though i pointed the extension right at it. on the fireGPG forums, this seems to be a known issue for some people (on both windows and linux) with no solid solution yet, so it may or may not bite you. the developer is working on it, so there’s still hope.
another thing i found myself wanting to do is have my private key on two different machines (home, work) so that i could send encrypted mail from both places. i found a really awesome command-line gpg cheatsheet that helps a lot when doing more of the fiddly bits, and i recommend reading it. tip for you windows users: after installing GPG4Win, running cmd.exe to get a terminal will let you do these command-line items.
so that’s been my past couple days, aside from a lot of super mario galaxy with sara. oh, and tiger woods pga tour 2008. which, while a nice game, has one of the worst interfaces in the known universe. cheers, and if i hear from you, i hope to hear from you via gpg!
