I came across a crowdfunding site for GnuPG with the tag line:
The world needs GnuPG encryption more than ever – a new website, new design, and new content will make strong crypto friendly.
If they can actually do something to make GnuPG, and computer security in general, more user friendly and approachable than it may actually be a cause worth supporting.
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 plain text version here to do proper validation against or check out my About Me page for full details.
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 finishing it. Luckily I was recently linked to the following website that deals with essentially everything I was going to write about anyway.
These days you really need a strong, unique password for almost everything you do online. To make matters even worse for the average user, security nuts will tell you that you actually need a different password for essentially every account you hold. Why? Consider the following scenario:
Little Timmy signs up for Facebook using his super secret password @wesomeS@auce3!. This password is so strong and good that even he can hardly remember it.
Say you are travelling, or are at a neighbourhood coffee shop, using whatever unsecured WiFi network they make available. You could either:
trust that no one is sniffing your web traffic, capturing passwords, e-mails, IMs, etc. trust that no one is using more sophisticated methods to trick you into thinking that you are secure (i.e. man in the middle attack) route your Internet traffic through a secure tunnel to your home PC before going out onto the web, protecting you from everyone at your current location which would you choose?
I logged onto my desktop the other day, for the first time in a couple of weeks – I’ve been away travelling, and was surprised to notice that my PGP key was set to expire. Long story short I have generated a brand new key.
OpenPGP Key
Name: Tyler Burton
Key ID: 0x1CD3E3D8
Key Fingerprint: 96ED 6B13 10B1 69C1 8299 693C 2921 6D80 1CD3 E3D8
Keyserver: pgp.mit.edu
Key Algorithm: RSA
Canada still imposes restrictions on encryption. Who knew?
Today I happen to read something that Michael Geist had written about Canada’s state of encryption laws and I was floored. In it he referenced this article which discussed the Government of Canada’s new public consultation on encryption laws. From the article:
Encryption controls have been a challenge for many Canadian software and hardware vendors. Category 5 — Part 2 of Canada’s Export Control List identifies information security items that require a permit in order to be exported from Canada to destinations other than the United States.
I have been meaning to write up a short post about this for a while, but thanks to the start of a new school term I have been a bit busy.
If you have seen the security news in the last month or so you will know that RSA-768, a 768bit or 232 decimal digit asymmetric key, has been broken (factored). This has important security repercussions for all of us because it is these public key algorithms like RSA, or ElGamal, that guard our online transactions, and e-mail conversations.
Well GPG to be more accurate 😉
As my existing key was set to expire at the end of this year I have issued myself a brand new one! After much though I finally decided that creating a new key from scratch was the best idea, rather than simply adding a new subkey, because I wanted to move away from DSA/ElGamal toward RSA primarily because of the weakening of SHA1. If this all sounds like gibberish to you then don’t worry, the details aren’t nearly as important as the security provided by my new key.
That’s right an update to your favourite hash verification program! 😛
This update includes a few new features that some of you might find useful. It also includes help documentation which walks you through how to use it!
New Features
Menu strip for even easier use Export features allows you to automatically write all of the hashes to a single file About dialog that provides information about the program Help documentation Requirements:
