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Using Security Tools Tutorials

Encryption Tools / Using Encrypted Email - PGP pt. 2




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OK, now we have a new key generated here and if you want to look at that we can, so we can see that we have the key generated. Now let's go ahead and use this key to send an E-mail. Let's go ahead and write an E-mail and we're going to send an E-mail to a user called Sam. Sam at vtc.net and we're going to title it Signed E-mail and with the E-mail dialog box still open we're going to say signed message, so we can actually attach the public key to this message, too and you kind of want to do that the first time you send a signed or encrypted message, you're actually attaching your public key here because you want that user to be able to download your public key and they'll send you the public key the same way. That way, once you've done the key exchange you can actually send signed and encrypted emails to each other, but the key exchange actually has to take place first. So let's go ahead: this is a signed message. I'll send that E-mail out. Now we get an option that says: Just encrypt and sign the message text, but not the attachments, or Encrypt each attachment separately and send the message using inline PGP. We can also send the message as a whole encrypted and signed. Let's go ahead and leave it the way it is, to sign the message text, but not the attachments. We want them to be able to get the public key down and since they don't have our public key yet stored encrypting this would not do any good because we don't have their public key either. So we're going to authorize the server to send it, putting in our password and it's gone. Now what we're going to do is switch over to our Linux box, our OpenSUSE 11 box and take a look at that received E-mail using Sam's E-mail and we're going to import that key. We're in our OpenSUSE 11 Linux box, we're going to open up Thunderbird on this side as well and now we're going to login as the user Sam, and open up our E-mail and we should have received an E-mail from the Bobby account that has a signed e-mail with OpenPGP. There we go. So now we've got a Thunderbird client up; let's enter our server password and voila, we've got a signed E-mail from Bobby Rogers. So let's open that up and as you can see we've got a PGP signed E-mail, so that E-mail has come across as signed and if you look down here you'll see the certificate on public key. Now if we don't import each other's public keys we're going to keep getting unverified signatures and so forth, so we really want to be able to verify those signatures, so let's go ahead and just import this public key right now and we're importing it, so now that is in our certificate store and if we actually go up here and look at our OpenPGP, go in and look at Key Management we're going to see that we've actually imported that key in here, so that key is in here and we've imported it, so we can use it. So let's go ahead and close this out. And we could reply back to that if we wanted to and in doing so we could also send our key as well. So let's go ahead and sign this message so we can send that public key back and we're going to go to OpenPGP, attach my public key, as you can see right here and send it out. So let's send our public key out and we get the same message here. We're going to say just encrypt sign the message text but not the attachments once again. So as you can see Thunderbird looks a little bit different on the Linux side, still a very good client to use. OK, the server is prompting us for a Password and actually we're being prompted to unlock our PGP Certificate, so let's go ahead and do that. Now we're being prompted from the server. Now, like everything else you probably don't want to just arbitrarily sign and encrypt Emails unless you really need them to, so only do this for security mail. You really don't need to do it for every single E-mail you send. But that's basically, in a nutshell, how to send and receive a signed E-mail. Now we can do the same thing with encryption and as long as we've got each other's public keys we can send and receive encrypted e-mail and decrypted, the process is basically the same. So we've used OpenPGP to generate keys, import them into E-mail stores and to use E-mail to send signed and encrypted messages. So it's actually not that difficult to do and you can do this with a number of clients or encryption mechanisms. You don't have to use OpenPGP or Thunderbird.

Tutorial Information

Course: Using Security Tools
Author: Bobby Rogers
SKU: 34068
ISBN: 1-935320-88-2
Release Date: 2009-12-04
Duration: 9 hrs / 91 lessons
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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