The Wonders of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)

I'm not really that paranoid, but I am concerned that the Internet is becoming increasingly insecure as an information exchange medium. I mean, the Internet never was secure from day one. It's just how it's evolved. As data is sent around the Internet, it jumps from host to host, network to network and surprisingly a lot of that data is simply sent as plain text that can be intercepted and viewed relatively easily.
There's an ever increasing number of people that are actively trying to capture unsecured information, whether it be for personal gain or some other nefarious purpose. You hear about it all the time; credit-card numbers stolen, forged documents....well, you get the picture.
How do you really know that the information you send and receive actually came from, or went to the other party securely. How do you really know that the message wasn't intercepted, read or modified whilst it was in transit.
The sad truth is that unless you securely encrypt that information, you can never be certain.

And this is where PGP steps in. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was invented by Phil R Zimmermann, an internet folk hero, in the early 90's. He based it on public-key cryptography which can be thought of being like a box and padlock that I make publicly available to you and to anyone else who wants it. A message can be placed inside the box, the padlock applied and then the whole lot is sent back to me. But only I have the key to the padlock, so only I can retrieve the message from the box. It's a simple and extremely effective system in principle. Just do a Google search for PGP if you want to learn more about PGP.

There's a whole lot more than just message encryption that PGP can do for you, like digital-signing and secure verification, but I'll leave it to you to discover them.

If you'd like to use PGP, there's quite a few software packages you can download. Some are free and some are not. I'm a bit of a tight-fist and I go for the free stuff. At PGP.com you can download some really simple to use PGP packages and both freeware and retail versions are available.

Personally, I use GNUPG (GNU Privacy Guard), a completely open and free PGP package.

If you do decide to have a crack at using PGP, when you create your public/private key set, you'll be asked for a key length. This commonly used to be 1024-bits, but now most people use 2048-bit keys. These 2048-bit keys are practically unbreakable. I have to say "practically" as nothing is ever 100% secure. However, 2048-bit keys would require a super-computer to crunch at them for thousands and thousands of years to break the encryption. So, practically they are secure.

Why not give PGP a go and feel secure with the knowledge your data is as safe as it can be whilst it makes its way around the Internet.
My public key is below.
Cheers, Keehan (January 2005)

keehan [dot] dowd [at] shaw [dot] ca

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (MingW32)

mQGiBEHfegERBACcQlArzJkMbMIOE5Q/jiGonT+Usd7BPBXHwHu0J3qsZBhpDPxZ
rkbOgiVDmYm076vPRFpg8CgTig2VtvXX+DtyI37Jvj2h66HrQAcRZU0Ervf3ttPn
kUF6lgydEpwlzj9abBIFwjb9VRVViYFov/D1niP/HGFmATMoYslg5YG8OwCg78OB
vq5eCDUdLahDGmFq8nv9Xy0D/RdYgClZ3kH54aGnVlMCPPRpNKLUhFlMac3oezQ2
kZlqPRYSJRMJm9gVI3c+kadC8nWifAUxh4X4cJnhZLttUWfXU0FCwmOs4mWm9nl5
xb6c+kf4qBpLIUc5kRBtV3tE49uEHner6ngGED8e8HNj8PwyXjTjQBQE0XYaISxB
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MyV55J4L75p2z57XxmM2IapC/Gq2cOKIK6QIIo6F9tGgg4lcrQs9kwW+6Gtrg8vH
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39xTwELkKmI6+gWaOv6mOAbMPwOjbmnkDKNbKSyAKqsNDp9pkQJFW4ICDg/OCbO+
zEqbAAMFB/9MnIRgv/kxMyI3xb8doGoUzEgkOYVs13KSeHcoRvWInfLPKnN/+86V
1q7nnx9rTopyE4ZHgPc0TNhiBjM/cBkBT33g6IzY7Jalv6fZzm+5WUTQjNHw2lge
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6cyFoDRvPQCeJ5fJ9m16UUiKPXwgrZlVo1+1VNIAoMUgRl18dj6HNsgCwJ5OA8Oo
gq60
=mqUU
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----