On sending such a message, you’re prompted for your passphrase. GPG Tools prompts you to enter the key’s passphrase when needed, and keeps it unlocked for 10 minutes with a default that can be changed. A key has an associated fingerprint, a cryptographic transformation of the public key that’s far shorter, which I’ll get to in a moment. This makes your key searchable by your name and email address in a PGP directory. Once you have a key, you can upload a key to a keyserver by selecting your key and choosing Key > Send Public Key to Keyserver. To use GPGTools with email, your key needs to have the same email address as the return address from which you want to send encrypted messages. The EFF instructions walk you through creating your own public/private key in GPG Keychain. The sent message is shown in the Sent mailbox as being encrypted, and has to be decrypted to view as in this window. GPGTools is currently free, but plans to charge a very modest fee for its email plug-in at some point to help support development costs. The EFF has very nice step-by-step instructions for installing GPGTools to allow it to be used directly with either Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird for email the tools are also available via the application Services menu wherever you can manipulate or select text. (PGP is a trademark, and GPG coined to get around it, but you’ll often see PGP used generically to refer to this method of using public keys.) It lets you build a directory of other people’s public keys, while also letting you carry out encryption, decryption, signing, and verifying.
#Gpg mail mac software
PGP is available for the Mac via GPGTools, a version of the free software GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). ( How PGP works is described in Part 1.)Ĭomposing a message in Mail to a recipient whose key is in your local GPG Keychain, the lock icon can be clicked to encrypt the message when sent. The service’s messaging and calling options received scores of 7 out of 7 in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s secure messaging scorecard.īut most of us don’t live in a walled garden, and one of the company’s founders, Phil Zimmermann, is responsible nearly 25 years ago for turning public-key cryptography into what he called PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy. It starts at $10 per month for unlimited text, calls, video chat, and file transfers among its users. Silent Circle has one of the best options that embeds public-key cryptography, if you can convince all the people with whom you need to communicate to opt in. The easiest way to solve both problems is to use an end-to-end proprietary ecosystem, but that gets us back, more or less, to iMessage or something similar. The second is existential: Without pre-arrangement, such as meeting in person or a phone call, how do you know that what purports to be someone’s public key is actually that person’s key? The first is pragmatic: Senders and recipients need compatible software tools or plugins, preferably integrated into apps so that little effort is required. But there are two missing pieces that would let Mac, iOS, and other platforms’ users take advantage of PK.
0 kommentar(er)
