Interesting article on e-mail security. I, too, have struggled with using PGP inasmuch as it requires the recipients to also have it. In light of this I decided to try out a program called CenturionMail from CenturionSoft (http://www.centurionsoft.com/). Is anyone else on here able to comment on this program?

Also, I’m wondering if, Simon, you’ll be writing on secure phone communications or if others here on the site have any knowledge of this subject. Specifically, I’m curious about encrypted cell phone communications and/or Skype-type phone services.

Thanks and I am finding the newsletter to be…interesting.

Don

Thank you for the info. It is tough to persuade all your associates to use such a program. Many folks don’t see the need since they think everything on the internet is private.

What has concerned me for years about this:
encryption flags your message and raises your profile. (Not to mention that it is illegal in some countries – France and Russia come to mind.)Nothing here would prohibit any of the “bad guys” from figuring out who the sender and the recipient are. Then (if they thought it was worth their while or they had nothing better to do) they would apply pressure. (Have you ever heard of “rubber-hose cryptanalysis”? How about “waterboarding”?)
What is the solution to this?

Likewise, and embarrassingly, it continually comes up that such back doors are in the routers and security hardware from Ci***, and probably all the other top-tier players.

Why would anyone expect it to be any other way? It is not in the human nature for the situation to be otherwise. Controls, snoopery, and huge black budgets, have been on the ascent, not descent, for the past 3 decades, so it would only stand to reason that things are considerably worse than they were in the 80’s when PGP was in court.

The so-called terrorists have taken what is probably the best sober position on the subject… when it comes to computer tech, the US govt cannot be beat. It is literally “their game”.

Yes, of course it is necessary to persuade users to adopt PGP or GPG in the first place. But once installed, it is completely transparent and very easy to use. I would definitely recommend GPG with Thunderbird. It works very well.

GPG is open source software so you can be really sure there are no back doors. Commentators might be remembering the prosecution of PGP creator Phil Zimmermann many years ago, but that did not actually force a back door and many people have gone on to develop the software since.

Still, I would not choose to use the commercial version of PGP precisely because of this risk. If you use the open source software it is free, anonymous and you can be sure there are no back doors.

Also Pradip has a good point. It is very important to secure your actual PC in your absence. That is the whole point of the site I mentioned in my earlier comment.

I also see other problem of management. Let us say one communicates with 25 to 30 individuals where secure communication is required. I either have to refer to my diary every time I want to send them a message or the email software has to keep a track of the 25 – 30 corresponding public keys. I would then have to secure my PC such that no one can access it in my absence. This is to prevent anyone from sending malware from my pc or reading my secure mail.

Either that of run my mail / web browser software from a pen drive and hang on to it for dear life.

Very good article and very useful. I have used PGP pro long time ago and it was hard to set it up with MS outlook. You are right, e-mail msgs do go ways around and I agree everyone should protect his privacy.

I run into this problem with it though so if you have an advice would be great:

When I started sending e-mails to my friends they were not encrypted because my friends don’t have pgp. So I was the only one who could get encrypted e-mail from them when I sent them the public key. The trouble was that I had to urge them to get a PGP program also.

Thanks

I prefer to fly under the radar, and I switch over to phonetic English (funetik inglish) in the middle of a sentence whenever I want certain words to slip past the lexical analyzers.