Secure Electronic Messaging & File Encryption: PGP

The Problem

For starters, e-mail is easy to forge. There was a time when it took some smarts, but now, just about anyone can forge electronic messages. E-mail offers little or no privacy, making it a bad medium for confidential communications. How many times have you slipped and replied to an entire mailing list?

Is secure e-mail possible?

PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") and GPG ("GNU Privacy Guard") are both implementations of OpenPGP (as defined by RFC4880), which you can use to encrypt your e-mail as well as digitally "sign" it so you don't have to worry about forgery.

Further information is available here for Local Support Providers (LSPs) who wish to consider using PGP.

Sharing Files with Sensitive Data

Secure Share is a service that can be useful to transfer files securely between individuals when other mechanisms (e.g. secure, shared file servers) aren't available.

Last updated: Thursday, April 9, 2009