Keep your details Private
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About Encryption and Making Your System Secure
What does encryption do for
me?
Encryption and cryptographic software
has been used in many
different ways to make systems more secure.
This article discusses only a few ways that such software
can make your
system more secure, including:
1) Encrypting your email
2) Encrypting your files
To programs are mentioned that will
help encrypt
information. There are many more programs out there that will help, but
these
programs are good and a good place to start as any. They have the added
benefit
of both being free with source code available.
Will encryption stop people
from accessing my
information?
Encryption simply makes it harder for
people to gain access
to important information, like passwords or sensitive information in a
file.
The first thing you should know about encryption is that the algorithm
that is
used to encrypt can be simple or more complex and that affects how
securely
what you have encrypted is protected.
Encryption systems have been broken when the method of
encryption is
understood by hackers and is easy to break.
Why bother to encrypt my
email?
It should be noted that email is far
less secure than paper
mail for two very good reasons: first,
electronic data can be accessed easily over an Internet and secondly,
electronic data is really simple to copy. There is a very good chance
that
someone has snooped around in your email despite your best intentions
to stop
it.
How do I go about encrypting my email?
There are many programs out there
that can help you encrypt
your email. A very
popular one is PGP
(Pretty Good Privacy) or its Gnu offshoot GPG.
PGP (http://www.pgpi.org/) self-describes itself this way:
This “is a program that gives your electronic mail something that it
otherwise doesn’t have: Privacy. It does this by encrypting
your mail
so that
nobody but the intended person can read it. When encrypted, the message
looks
like a meaningless jumble of random characters.
PGP has proven itself quite
capable of resisting even the most sophisticated forms of analysis
aimed at
reading the encrypted text.”
Why bother to encrypt my
files?
The answer to this boils down to what
you store on your
computer. If you
have financial data
with important information like social security numbers, email
addresses,
account numbers and passwords, then you open yourself up to losing very
valuable information. Most
corporate
Internet security employees will attest to the widespread theft of very
valuable information. As long as you are connected to the Internet you
are
vulnerable.
How do I go about encrypting
my files?
- Windows
Privacy Tools (WinPT) -
Windows Privacy Tools (including the Windows Privacy Tray,
ie WinPT Tray, and the WinPT Explorer
Extensions), is a set of tools that allow you to encrypt your data
using GnuPG (see elsewhere
on this page). It is a frontend to GnuPG that resides in your system
tray that may be used
as a universal plug-in to any email software. The software is free. - PGP (Pretty
Good Privacy) Public Key Encryption
-
The above link is to the International PGP Home Page,
where you can get
free binaries and sources for Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) for a
variety of operating systems for either US or non-US countries. You can
use PGP to encrypt your email in conjunction with your email
client, be it Eudora, ELM, PINE, or whatever. PGP is a public key
encryption system, which means that you have two keys
(passwords), one which is known only to you and the other is known to
your recipient. Messages or documents (or whatever) encoded with
one key can only be decoded with the other. You can read more about
this from the PGP FAQs at the site. Note that the free versions of PGP
lag behind the commercial (paid)
target="_top"
onmouseover="window.status='http://PGPstore.com';return true;"
onmouseout="window.status=' ';return true;">PGP Whole Disk
Encryption
and target="_top"
onmouseover="window.status='http://PGPstore.com';return true;"
onmouseout="window.status=' ';return true;">PGP Desktop
Email Encryption. - GPG: GNU
Privacy Guard -
GPG, a.k.a. GnuPG, is the GNU version of PGP (Pretty Good
Privacy), a public key encryption system. Like all things GNU, it is
free and can be freely
distributed and modified. It is generally compatible with the newer PGP
versions (depending on the
encryption algorithms you choose); but you should read their FAQ for
more details.
The information above was obtained
from the following site which has more details on security encryption.
target="_top">Free Encryption / Cryptographic Software
