Keyed In
US intelligence agencies tap into billions of call data and electronic messages monthly – reason enough to consider encrypting your email traffic.
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© Kirill Bodrov - 123RF.com
US intelligence agencies tap into billions of call data and electronic messages monthly – reason enough to consider encrypting your email traffic.
Anyone sending email unencrypted needs to be aware that everyone can intercept or tap into it. Thus, it's highly advisable to encrypt your communications. Two encryption methods have prevailed over the years, S/MIME and OpenPGP. Both are open standards that are constantly being monitored for vulnerabilities by security experts.
S/MIME, like the HTTPS protocol, is based on the name-checking of commercial certificates of Certification Authorities (CAs). It's used mainly in the corporate world, whereas OpenPGP is more prevalent in the private sector. This article focuses on the open source OpenPGP that the free software GnuPG [1] provides under Linux.
In this article, I'll provide some basic guidelines for encrypting your email and explains how to encrypt and decrypt messages with the common Linux mail clients KMail and Thunderbird. This scenario can also be used with other mail programs that support GnuPG. An important part of this process is ensuring that both senders and recipients are prepared to send and receive encrypted email traffic.
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Since the NSA snooping scandal, many companies have started to offer secure communication services and storage. However, if you really want secure email communication, you need end-to-end encryption using GnuPG.
Gone are the days when we read email solely sitting at our computers. To read messages on the move, we now have IMAP, which has completely displaced POP. Trojitá makes IMAP easy, even with accounts with big folders.
Trojitá is new to the scene of email clients, but it already stands out for its intuitive interface and speed. Even so, this client is still missing some essential functions.
ZuluCrypt is an easy-to-operate graphical front end that is suitable for encrypting files, partitions, and drives with LUKS, TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt, and dm-crypt. ZuluCrypt cannot handle a complete encryption of the entire system, but it is able to scramble system partitions.
Important data can easily be protected against unauthorized access using encrypted containers. Tomb is a potential replacement for the now discontinued TrueCrypt, and it performs its job elegantly just using Linux's onboard tools and standard processes.
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