That’s my question. Any and all answers appreciated.
I’m a technological simpleton too and I find PGP really easy to use. Understanding how it encrypts stuff, that’s the hard part. But you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car.
Google PGP and look for the graphical frontend for it. All you do is supply the key, which could be a phrase or the like and select your directories.
There should also be tutorials on encrypting your hard drive or individual directories. How secure it is , I cant say. The local PD may not be able to crack it , but the higher you go in federal law enforcement , the more resources they have to bear.
Declan
I haven’t used PGP in years because NAI (Network Associates, Inc. - the former owner of PGP), and now the PGP Corporation (the current owner), have been jerking everyone around for years. In their defense, PGP Corp. has been more open with PGP than NAI was, but they’re still pretty restrictive. PGP’s trial version is restricted to personal, non-commercial use after 30 days, and it also cripples quite a few of the features after that time. This makes Hulk angry.
Thankfully, PGP is just one of several OpenPGP implementations. The most popular by far is GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). GPG – sometimes called GnuPG – is the GNU Project’s excellent, open-source, OpenPGP-compatible encryption package. They release it under the GPL license, so it’s free as in beer and as in speech. The drawback to GPG vs. PGP (for most users) is that GPG is a traditional, command-line driven application.
This is where gpg4win comes in. GPG4win takes all of these things and packages them together into a single windows installer package so that you don’t have to screw with it:
GPG/GPG2 - the core encryption package
GPA - A graphical keyring manager front-end for GPG
WinPT - Another graphical keyring manager that runs in the system tray
GPGol - A GPG plugin for Outlook (email encryption)
GPGee - A GPG plugin for Windows explorer (file encryption)
Claws Mail - A stand-alone mail client with GPG support if you just don’t have anything else to use (not installed by default)
It also includes a “novice guide” in English that explains how to use everything. There’s an expert guide, too, but only in German. It basically does everything that PGP does, only you don’t have to worry about getting jerked around in the future since it’s built on GPG. I don’t think it’s any more difficult to use than PGP. The only mildly confusing issue is whether or not you want to install GPG2 (it is not installed by default). GPG2 adds S/MIME support to GPG. For a novice user, this probably doesn’t matter. I recommend installing it just so that you don’t have to installer it later if you need it.
You might also be interested in Enigmail, a GPG plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird. If you have installed GPG4win, this should let you encrypt mail in Thunderbird as well.
And since we’re on the topic, you you should check out a little project called TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt isn’t directly related to OpenPGP, but it is, however, completely awesome. It’s a package for creating strongly encrypted hard drives, partitions, flash drives, or virtual disks for secure storage. It’s similar to the PGPDisk application (now PGP Whole Disk Encryption) that comes only with the commercial version of PGP. It can also create “hidden volumes” inside of other TrueCrypt volumes, which is simply genius. If you want to encrypt something in a way that you can’t be forced to reveal the key, this is the way to go.
Lots of good stuff, Stathol, I will give it try tomorrow.
Oh, and I forgot to mention FireGPG. This is a very, very cool plugin for Firefox that lets you do all sorts of things with GPG and web pages. Most importantly, it adds GPG encryption to Gmail! :eek:
I downloaded GPG4win and wonder, if I Run the program, can I read the beginner’s manual before I do anything (stupid or otherwise) with GPG4win?
Same question for FireGPG _ although I haven’t downloaded this Plug-In as yet. I have FireFox and Gmail, so I’m very interested in this.
Thanks so much for your information-rich posts.