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GUIDE TO (mostly) HARMLESS HACKING
Beginners' Series Number 6
PGP for Newbies
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Do you cringe at the idea of people snooping on your email and
through the files on your computer? Encryption is the only
way to be absolutely certain you can keep your private stuff really
private. Even if you are a newbie, encryption can be surprisingly
easy -- if you use the free PGP program, the encryption technique
so powerful that it is illegal to use in some countries! The
following GTMHH was written by Keydet89 <keydet89@yahoo.com>,
so if you want to ask questions, email him and not me! (Carolyn
Meinel).
This Guide will tell you about:
[Creating your own keys]
[Importing keys]
[Creating a group of keys]
[Making your public key public]
[Encrypting Files]
[Encrypting your email]
PGP is a personal encryption program that you can use to encrypt
files or email.
PGP is 'Pretty Good Privacy', originally created by Phil Zimmerman. The
long and short of the story is that Phil released his encryption
program to the public and was investigated by the federal government. As
soon as the investigation was closed, Phil started a company based
on his product, which was later purchased by Network Associates.
You can get the freeware version of PGP from:
http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html
Note: All of the examples used in this Guide are performed
using PGPfreeware 6.0. The link above is for this version.
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NEWBIE NOTE: How to use PGP will be described, but if you
want to make it a little easier to use, download the Eudora
email client and install PGP's Eudora plug-in. The tools
from PGP appear as icons on the toolbar in Eudora, and
encrypting or decrypting an email is as easy as selecting
an icon.
To get Eudora freeware to use with PGP, go to:
http://www.eudora.com/products/
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Once you have the PGP freeware program, double-click on the
icon to install it. Just follow the instructions, they are
very straight-forward, and there are no tricks or surprises along
the way. You will have to reboot your computer, though, but
when you do, PGP Tray should be in your Startup group, and there
will be a little lock icon on the TaskBar.
NOTE: For the purposes of this Guide, PGP 6.0 was installed
on NT 4.0/SP 3. However, there should be no great difference
with 95/98.
More PGP for newbies-->>
