Aun’s Blog

Encryption / Signatures for web mail

Gmail is my client of choice for personal e-mail. However, it doesn’t offer any sort of encryption or signatures for that matter. The other day my wife got an e-mail from an acquaintance - someone who rarely writes to her, but this person was asking for money - the e-mail looked genuine with a story to back it up. The only thing that gave it away was that the person was asking the money to be sent through Western Union, and the punctuation etc seemed a bit “spam-like.” My wife did recognize that it might not be from that person - turns out, it wasn’t. The “real” person e-mailed back the other day letting people know that she had not sent any e-mail, and thanked people for e-mailing her asking her how to send the money. So, the point being that a lot of people did believe it was really their friend in distress. There was no way of verifying that through the e-mail, except to look at the From address.

Security is something that has been missing from e-mail for a while now - everyone talks so much about security of networks, servers, etc, but e-mail mostly always contains information that you don’t want people other than your intended recipient(s) reading. And it mostly traverses the internet in clear-text. How easy is it to sniff traffic and read what someone’s sending! If encryption is something that is not do-able for someone, then how about signatures, to verify that the person sending it is really the person sending it. I need that - I do. Everyone should have it. And surely, someone must’ve thought of this, so I decided to google around, and came across this awesome Firefox extension for Gmail (FireGPG), which utilizes GPG (GNU version of PGP). All you need to do is install GPG software (found here) on your PC, which FireGPG uses to encrypt/sign, etc. You will then see buttons when you hit compose to sign/encrypt etc right on Gmail. SWEET! Now to get my public key out to people and convince them to get this running! Oh yeah, here’s my public key if you want to send e-mails to me. Spread the word people!!

Update: Here’s a reason to start thinking about this -  Monster attack steals user data