Phoenix Network Forums

Greetings.

I would like to know how many people here do use email encryption and signatures. Also tell me how paranoid you are regarding email authenticity.

I don't care

I use a simple plug-in on evolution for PGP

No, don't use encryption or anything, but I looked into it before. It was pretty complicated, seemed to me, and there isn't all that much that I send on email that I particularly care about being intercepted anyways, so never got past understanding what it was

reki wrote:No, don't use encryption or anything, but I looked into it before. It was pretty complicated, seemed to me, ...

The system itself is not complicated, but sometimes the user interface is. You might want to try out Thunderbird with the Enigmail extension (also available there). You might need to install GnuPG for it to work. I strongly suggest to prefer GnuPG over PGP, because it's free and thus better tested.

If you have the user interface working, then the process is rather simple: create a key pair for each of your email addresses; Enigmail will assist you on this. Use 2048 or 4096 key bits (prefer the latter). Then you can sign messages for other users and others can encrypt messages to you. You need to give your public key to them first.

If you understand the basics of email security, then you can work with more advanced features like key servers and webs of trust.

no i dont use any of encryptions.
i allways think: if someone/something realy need to see my message he would find a way to do that
I cant imagine why would somene wonted to know where would me and my friends going to be tonight

SqlByte wrote:i allways think: if someone/something realy need to see my message he would find a way to do that

But that's not the case. With email encryption he doesn't have any way. If he wants to attack, he needs to do this, before the keys have been exchanged. When exchanging keys properly, he won't even be able to attack then.

Also the more important thing about email security is signing. Faking mails is still easy. A nine years old child could do it. With those signatures, you can cryptographically ensure, that the message is not faked and wasn't altered on its way to the recipient.

your right freak
i never thought about that
but in every encription there is a "bug" ... i dont know it you dont know it but... NSA maybe knows it
but afcourse some lame s.kiddie just know how to send fake email and ... yes signature can be of help ther.

SqlByte wrote:but in every encription there is a "bug" ... i dont know it you dont know it but... NSA maybe knows it ;)

Actually there is a bug in it, but you can't call it bug. It's the asymmetry that you can easily multiplicate primes together, but you can't easily split the product into the original primes again, if you don't know them. That's why it's called asymmetric encryption. However, there is no proof that this is not possible. It's just unlikely to be possible.

There is already a theoretical way to do that, but you'd need to build a stable quantum computer with enough qubits to do that. Currently it's impossible to build it. To keep it short: no cipher is absolutely secure, else you couldn't decrypt anymore and had a bunch of truely random data. It's unlikely that the NSA has cracked any cipher, because the whole world is trying that as well.

I don't know if some webmails using some encryption than i using it becouse i don't have any pop3 email acc and i don't need it i think so gmail is working fine for me and some another emails afcource with smaller size :-)

thebeast wrote:I don't know if some webmails using some encryption than i using it becouse i don't have any pop3 email acc and i don't need it i think so gmail is working fine for me and some another emails afcource with smaller size :-)

Gmail should be usable via POP3/SMTP as well. Encryption is only worthful, if you do it locally. It's worthless in web-based email agents.