PGP Info

The Problem with Email

The email protocols commonly used on the Internet suffer from three basic problems:

1. Anybody with a sniffer on your Internet connection can easily read your email. This is because email is transmitted as plain text. This is really baffling when you consider that the Internet was originally designed for military use.
2. An email message can be altered in transit or while sitting on a server. You have no way to be sure that what you received is actually what was sent to you.
3. The worst problem, in my opinion, is that anybody can sign your name to their email. It is easy to do with almost any email program. You can put any address you want right there in the "From:" field. This is often used by viruses and scammers for malicious and fraudulent purposes. It actually upsets me to know that anybody can claim to be sending an email from one of my addresses.

The Solution: PGP

There is a solution to all of these problems and it is called PGP (for Pretty Good Privacy). It solves the problems like this:

1. Messages can be encrypted so that only someone with the private key can decrypt it. To everyone else the message looks like gibberish.
2. A "digital signature" can be added to a message. This is a way to prove that none of the contents of the message have been altered from the time that they were signed by someone with the secret (private) key.
3. The digital signature also solves the problem of identifying who sent a message, because only the person with the private key could have signed it.

I think that the problems listed above are really big problems, and I think that everyone should use PGP (or any program such as GPG, which conforms to the same standard) until the email protocols themselves get fixed.

My Public Key

Here is my public key.

This is the fingerprint: 1FF6 9E45 A453 96D3 F663  0032 9400 312D 4FC0 6427

Free Software

Sadly, the PGP corporation no longer offers a free version.

The best bet now for Windows users who dont want to pay anything is to use GPG, Thunderbird, and Enigmail. It may take you a couple of days to get everything set up, but its worth it.

Now you can send me secret messages! Isn't that cool!