Winter’s Haven

To go along with the new name, I made a new OpenPGP cryptographic key. Download it and then phone me to verify the key fingerprint.

For those of you who aren’t so familiar with cryptography, it is just a set of mathematical tools which enable people to exchange messages (e.g. email) over unsecured channels (e.g. the internet) while ensuring that (1) only the intended recipient can read the message, and (2) the recipient is guaranteed that the message was not written by an imposter. Keeping eavesdroppers out of your email is good. Thwarting would-be imposters is even better. As I have sometimes demonstrated to my friends, it is very easy (VERY, VERY easy) to forge the “From” line in email.

The needed cryptographic software can be obtained from GnuPG.org. GnuPG was originally written with Unix-type systems in mind, but they do also have Windows and Mac versions.

This entry was posted 2006-Oct-4 and is filed under Mathematics, Personal. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.