Secure between you and others – Encryption

Picture a world where complete strangers know the personal information you send to your family, everything you send to someone else, is copied and viewed to make sure you are not a threat to the society. This sadly is what seems to be happening more and more lately, but if you are diligent there are things you can do to keep your information private.

With his group of entries I will explain how to use encryption of email between you and another person to keep the information out of prying eyes. The idea is simple, being able to send and receive mail between you and another knowing that even if the traffic is sniffed and the data is captured it will be secure for a while, I say this because as technology evolves it will at some point be able to DE-crypt the message, but most likely far in the distant future long after you and most of the human race is gone. The idea is to keep the length of time long enough so it does not matter if they do DE-crypt it because the information will no longer be useful. I will discuss using Thunderbird, GnUPG (PGP) and enigma mail plugin as my E-mail and encryption programs. There are others that will be added as time goes on. This set of entry’s will cover securing your E-mails from others, they being your ISP’s, data miners and even your own Government. We could talk all day about the idea that if your not doing anything you have nothing to hide, but will just leave it as the only ones that need to read it is you and the person you are sending it to, no one else.

What is Public key Encryption –

Why think about encryption? If you have nothing to hide then you don’t need to use it, do you? Just some of the questions that people put forth when you say you want to encrypt stuff between you and the other person only. Security is a right not a privilege, what is exchanged between you and the person should only be known between you and the person. There are many ways to encrypt messages, the one I will describe is called public key encryption.

The idea is that Bob and Alice want to exchange messages and do not want John to be able to see them. The problem is that the only method is a media that can be sniffed that is the traffic can be viewed. Think of the postal carrier: you put the mail in the mail box and the letter going into a public system that can be looked at if one wishes. To prevent that public, key cryptology was created. The way to think about it is that each of you have two types of mathematically defined keys. Both of the keys are created at the same time. One key you keep and one your give away, that may sound strange but here is why. You use the public key to encrypt and only encrypt the message, by knowing the public key you can not decrypt the message. When you get the encrypted message you use your private key and only your private key to decrypt it. The private key can be used to know it is you and only you that will read the message. Each private and public key are a matched set and if they are tampered with they will no longer work together. (the deep workings are at this time a bit beyond the scope of this but maybe I will do a special posting explaining it deeper)

Now back to Bob and Alice’s message exchange problem, Bob wants to send Alice a message that only Alice will be able to read, One way this could be done is to have both of them use the same password to encrypt the message, the problem is how do you exchange the password if they never are able to see meet each other directly. This is were the public key comes in, this is a lock that can be publicly given out that can be used to encrypt a message by anyone. But only the recipient has the private key to decrypt the message. The first thing they do is create a combination of private and public key, this means that the public key can be used to lock the box but only the private or secret key can be used to unlock the box.. So after they both create there public/private keys they can do one of many ways to exchange the public keys. They can send them to a central key server that holds the keys so Bob can search for Alice’s public key, Alice can just send Bob the public key in E-mail, if they are really paranoid, Alice can send the key one letter at a time to Bob and he can convert it for use, long way but it does work. Lets say Bob get the key from Alice some way, Bob would then take the message and put it in the box and lock the box with Alice’s lock and send the box to Alice, this box is unbreakable when the lock is added. Alice upon getting the box would use her private key to unlock the box and view the message. Bob could put his private key into the box so Alice can verify the message was from Bob. Simple but you should now get the general idea, some questions could be how does Bob know the private key is from Alice and not John and vice versa.

Deeper reading of you like

www.gnupg.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

http://www.openpgp.org/

http://www.pgpi.org/

http://www.pgpi.org/doc/pgpintro/

http://pgp.mit.edu/

http://philzimmermann.com/EN/findpgp/