Recently there have been two very good, and opposing, articles written on the state of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and whether or not it is worth using in 2016/2017 and beyond. You can find the original article, I’m throwing in the towel on PGP, and I work in security, at Ars Technica here but I’ve reproduced…
If you are worried about your hard drive one day crashing and you losing access to your OpenPGP key (and thus the contents of your encrypted e-mails) then you should have been using a backup! That said an extra archival method of storing your key completely offline would be to use a program called paperkey…
While I am by no means a security expert the following are the current best practices for configuring your gpg.conf file as best as I can determine. Key usage options default-key <your primary key> Use <your primary key> as the default key to sign with. If this option is not used, the default key is…
As advances in cryptography and technology move forward there is a chance that your once secure system may suddenly be relying on outdated (and perhaps now broken) algorithms or implementations. Some good examples of this in recent memory are the breaking of the MD5 hash algorithm and the constant problems plaguing the RC4 encryption cipher…
I recently came across a very good (albeit sort of old) post over at Chris Wellons’ null program blog about increasing the default protections on your stored PGP key. The short hand version is that gpg attempts to protect your PGP key from theft by encrypting it on disk so that if anyone gets access…
Came across pgp.asc a while back but finally got around to setting it up here. What is pgp.asc? From their website: What is pgp.asc? pgp.asc is an initiative to decentralize public PGP keys, making it easier to get an up to date and authenticated key. Sounds complicated? It isn’t: Just upload your public PGP key…
If you’ve had issues trying to get Thunderbird to send your PGP signed e-mail using anything other than SHA-1 there is a quick and easy fix that will let you pick whichever hash you prefer. 1) Open up Thunderbird’s preferences 2) On the Advanced Tab, under General click Config Editor… 3) In the about:config window…
After reading this I’m still not 100% sure there can ever be a completely “safe” way to do this with Twitter. That said some ways are certainly better than others… Personally I think the best of the approaches listed is to include the full key fingerprint and then to also periodically tweet the details. At…
Below you will find my OpenPGP Key Transition notice signaling my intention to migrate from my current key (0x1CD3E3D8) to my new one (0xFEEEFA8F). Note that it is very likely that the software used on this website will render the notice in such a way as to invalidate the signature below. Instead please see the…
I’ve been meaning to write a quick post on PGP/OpenPGP related settings that you can use to increase your overall security even more. Simple things like changing your preferred cipher and digest algorithms. In fact I even started writing just such a post about a year and a half ago but never got around to…