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Big Dog Joined: 18 Oct 2000 Posts: 4410

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Original Article - http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00008b.asp

Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 5:08 pm Post subject:

Encryption is nice, but not something I've begun using yet.

Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 6:03 am Post subject:

Ahh PGP/GPG one great tool.. Back in the day.. well only about 5 or 6 years ago when i first started playing with pgp it came with a utility called pgpdisk which i thought was great.. you could create a 300mb encripted file and mount it as a disk. made things real simple. not really necassary nowdays since you can create encripted filesystems built into most operating systems base systems.. well except for windows.

Another great purpose of it is to verify emails to ensure they are really comming from the person they say they are.. everybody knows it's extremely simple to spoof a email address..

But pgp is just one of many tools used for encryption.. Different encryption methods have been used to hide information since ancient Egypt and Rome. encryption was also used in the middle ages, during the world war 1 & 2. And is use became more widely used than ever when computers were introduced. Another good thing to read up on is the various cyphers and which are stronger and why.. my particular favorite would be blowfish. but there's RSA, DSA, MD5, DES & TRIPLE DES, etc....

but it's also important to know how this works..

From PGP faq “how PGP works”

Quote:

PGP combines some of the best features of both conventional and public key cryptography. PGP is a hybrid cryptosystem. When a user encrypts plaintext with PGP, PGP first compresses the plaintext. Data compression saves modem transmission time and disk space and, more importantly, strengthens cryptographic security. Most cryptanalysis techniques exploit patterns found in the plaintext to crack the cipher. Compression reduces these patterns in the plaintext, thereby greatly enhancing resistance to cryptanalysis. (Files that are too short to compress or which don't compress well aren't compressed.)

PGP then creates a session key, which is a one-time-only secret key. This key is a random number generated from the random movements of your mouse and the keystrokes you type. This session key works with a very secure, fast conventional encryption algorithm to encrypt the plaintext; the result is ciphertext. Once the data is encrypted, the session key is then encrypted to the recipient's public key. This public key-encrypted session key is transmitted along with the ciphertext to the recipient. Decryption works in the reverse. The recipient's copy of PGP uses his or her private key to recover the temporary session key, which PGP then uses to decrypt the conventionally-encrypted ciphertext.

The combination of the two encryption methods combines the convenience of public key encryption with the speed of conventional encryption. This means
that conventional encryption is about 1, 000 times faster than public key encryption. Public key encryption in turn provides a solution to key distribution and data transmission issues. Used together, performance and key distribution are improved without any sacrifice in security.

But overall a good read.... nice job..