pgp/gnupg

[ron.peterson at yellowbank.com (Ron Peterson)]

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On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, dan moylan wrote:

> John Abreau wrote:
> >>> I'm also curious how many of us actually use PGP or GnuPG.
>
> dan moylan wrote:
> >> i for one have never had occasion to use either, and only vaguely
> >> understand what would occasion its necessity.

Do you lock the door to your house or your car?

Electronic security measures have the same purpose as physical
security measures: to control access.  Using such tools does not imply
you are hatching evil plans any more than locking the door to your
house does.

I change the root password to a server, and want to inform my
coworkers.  I can let them know via encrypted email.  I have a
bazillion passwords, credit card numbers, etc. that I need ready
access to.  I store them encrypted on disk.  Etc.  If you have
electronic information that you'd like to keep private, you use tools
such as GPG.  That's all.

I run crontab scripts several times daily to keep data syncronized
between my primary work and home computers.  I don't want my life's
work transmitted over the Internet in plain text.  I don't want my
authentication credentials travelling over the Internet in plain
text.  Because my data is syncronized, I can easily recover from
disaster.  rsync+ssh has saved my ass more than once.

Pretty mundane stuff.  But important.  I am more than a little
concerned that if enough people say "I don't get it, it seems like
only terrorist would care about such things", that the utility of
these important tools will be severly compromised by a government
over-eager to placate the fearful masses.

I'm going to sign this message using GPG.  If you trust the
authenticity of my public key, you can do things like verify that it
was, in fact, me who wrote this email.  Perhaps not so significant in
this instance, but very significant in the case of contract documents.
Considering that congress has recently passed legislation validating
the use of electronic signature, this proves very useful indeed.

The purpose of a keysigning party is to establish trust in people's
public keys.  I can have a lot more confidence that a key belongs to
you if you tell me so in person, and prove your identity w/ a driver's
license and/or passport than if you simply, say, email it to me.

One place to turn if you'd like more information is the GPG manual:
http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html.

People who use GPG are generally neither stupid nor terrorists.

- -- 

- -Ron-
https://www.yellowbank.com/
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