An Introduction to GNU Privacy Guard 121
An anonymous reader writes "This is a great article about GnuP . . . "In the first half of this article David Scribner discussed the various uses that GNU Privacy Guard could bring to your business or personal life in enhancing security of your digital documents and files, as well as the basics in getting started with GnuPG. As there is so much more to public-key security than command-line operations, in this second half I will continue with importing and exporting keys, building (and keeping) your 'web of trust' sound, and a few of the more popular GUI front ends available for GnuPG . . ."
The Anonymous Reader (Score:3, Interesting)
Gee, could the "anonymous reader" be David Scribner giving himself a shameless plug? See the above quote.
Re:The Anonymous Reader (Score:1, Interesting)
Did David submit it hismelf? Probably either he or one of a small handful of people that know him (not I personally).
But if that's the case, why as an "Anonymous Coward?" I can only speak for myself, but I so rarely make comments or submissions at slashdot that the need to remember another password and the storage space for account info at slashdot would be wasted.
James Blackwell, LinuxGuru.net [linuxguru.net]
GnuPG is the way to go. (Score:3, Interesting)
The simple and undisputed -- and often argued -- fact is that we've come a long way, and the majority of large businesses are now using Linux as both a desktop and server OS which means these things are efficient to do.
GnuPG's (shouldn't that be GNUPG since GNU is an acronym?) ease of use and its (almost) seamless connectivity with most Linux communications applications allows the average workplace user to encrypt documents and files, preventing PR-disasteresque leaks -- such as the recent leak of the salary details of Lycos' staff to InternalMemos.com.. [com.com]
The seamless and very good encryption and decryption system allows staff of lots of big and small companies to simultaneously access and also work on their valuable and secure data as usual, but means that even if sites like F**kedCompany get hold of it, it's no use to them. Copying and pasting will just result in goobledygook being produced.
GnuPG's automated hyperencryption routines also mean that it could have some extremely useful and oblique military functionality, allowing our brave patriots to fight terrorism around the world.
One such example is in the encryption of numeric data such as numbers like digits between 0 and digits under 9. These encyrption routines can improve the efficiency of this by 24%.
Re:What are you hiding? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ok... (Score:2, Interesting)
We used GNUPG to split the public key and private key across two machines. The first machine is our public web server and can encrypt and store the credit card numbers with the public key but not decrypt the them. The second machine (very secured and locked down) can encrypt the data but doesn't have access to the stored credit card numbers. A third machine (in this case a browser) shuttles the between the systems when it is needed. Since the machines are widely separated it makes any successful attack much harder.
We chose GNUPG because it already had robust public/private key encryption built in and used an open standard for representing data so that data recovery would be possible even 10 years from now. The only complaint is that there was no API available so we had to create a COM wrapper for it (yeah I know it was a IIS/ASP site).
If anybody is interested in the source code for the COM wrapper it can be downloaded here:
http://www.i15.com/video/gpg2.zip
Normal disclaimers apply. I take no responsibility for what it may do but we have used it without complaint. Only works when GNUPG is in batch mode. It is one of those things that I always meant to release under the GPL but didn't get around to it because I never did documentation. BTW here is how it works:
Set gpg = Server.CreateObject("qwerksoft.gnupg")
gpg.SetPath %Path%
gpg.SetRecipient %Recipient%
s = "Text to be encrypted"
Response.Write s + vbNewLine
s = gpg.Encrypt(s)
Response.Write s + vbNewLine
s = gpg.Decrypt(s)
Response.Write s + vbNewLine
Maybe if a few more people use this it will reduce the number of stolen cards floating around.
Pseudo-random Key-gen Security (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm particularly curious about how secure the GnuPG key-gen process is. How "pseudo-random" is it? What's the likelihood that I could generate a private key matching someone else's?
Should I be concerned?
Needs a LGPL lib (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What are you hiding? (Score:1, Interesting)
i may not have something incredibly important to protect.
but just because i its not important, doesnt mean im going to put a billboard up