After following the various NSA revelations and resulting Hacker News commentary I decided to learn about email encryption. The result, it’s surprisingly easy.
This article will be written from the perspective of a user running OSX and Google Mail.
Configure your Email
Enable IMAP access to your Gmail account following Google’s instructions
Configure Apple’s default e-mail application, Mail for use with your gmail account. Enter your name, email & password. Next select ‘IMAP’ as the account type, and use ‘imap.google.com’ as the incoming mail server. Once this is complete Mail will pull in your emails.
GPG Tools
Since the GPG guide does a very good job describing this entire process, I will just provide the highlights.
Download the (GPG Suite](https://gpgtools.org/index.html). GPGtools provides an SHA-1 hash to verify the contents of the file are unchanged from their provided build. My previous post explains why it’s a good idea to confirm this.
Create your GPG key, share your public key with the centralized keyserver. Sharing the key with the central authority allows individuals to initiate encrypted conversations without knowing your public key.
Remember, use a strong passphrase. One way to easily produce strong pass-phrases is with Apple’s built in Keychain password assistant. Two-factor authentication will further increase the strength, by combining the saved randomly generated string with a phrase that you remember.
Send your first encrypted email. If the installation of GPGTools went well, your Mail application will have some new features, a green OpenPGP indicator at the top right of every new email, along with a Lock & Star icon. The Star icon indicates that the Mail application has access to your GPG keys, and is signing the message. The lock button indicates that you have the recipient’s public encryption key (this is why you uploaded your public key to the centralized authority).
Check the encrypted email’s plain-text contents, either with your Mail app, or by logging into Gmail. Unencrypted, the contents will look something like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 | |
And that’s it. If you want to try this out, my public key is listed with the centralized GPG public key authority. My address is: chris@csfields.com
If you want to learn more about encryption, I would strongly suggest beginning with Bruce Schenier’s blog.