Schadenfreude » encryption

RSA Made Easy

Erik — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 05:41:07 +0000

After obsessing over it today, I decided to write a quick primer on RSA Encryption you can do in your head. It’s pretty simple, and to the point. The numbers are very small. Try it out!

I plan to write some code implementing the algorithm. That should be fun.

Make GPG ask about cert-level

Erik — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:23:00 +0000

I was sad to find that my GnuPG installation wasn’t asking me about cert-level when I was tsigning keys today. To turn it on, I put the following at the bottom of my ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf:


ask-cert-level

Now, when doing tsigning, it will ask how well you checked the identity of the person whose key you are signing. Like this:


How carefully have you verified the key you are about to sign actually belongs
to the person named above?  If you don't know what to answer, enter "0".

   (0) I will not answer. (default)
   (1) I have not checked at all.
   (2) I have done casual checking.
   (3) I have done very careful checking.

Your selection? (enter `?' for more information):

Horray!

I’m the newest GSWoT GSI

Erik — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 05:01:00 +0000

I have joined the GSWoT. I am the newest Gossamer Spider Web of Trust Introducer! This is a great honor, and I’d like to thank Kara Denizi for giving me the chance to join.

Above, I’ve posted the current state of the keyring. It also includes an outlier from my personal keyring.

Props to sig2dot for creating that graph. Here’s the commands:


wget -O gswot.keyring "http://biglumber.com/x/web?keyring=5802;download=1"
sudo apt-get install graphviz imagemagick
wget http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/sig2dot/sig2dot.pl
gpg --list-sigs --keyring ./gswot.keyring | perl sig2dot.pl > gswot.dot
neato -Tps gswot.dot > gswot.neato.ps
convert gswot.neato.ps gswot.neato.jpg

Pretty easy – I might have to use this in the future for more graphs and digraphs…

HOWTO: Export and Import Private GPG Keys

Erik — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:34:00 +0000

I had a problem today. I wanted to encrypt something with my GPG Key. It was only on my laptop. Here’s what I did:


  gpg --export-secret-keys > gpgkeyfile
  gpg -c gpgkeyfile
  shred -u gpgkeyfile

Then move gpgkeyfile.gpg to another computer. To import them again:


  gpg -d gpgkeyfile.gpg > gpgkeyfile
  gpg --import gpgkeyfile


gpg: key 9140A8C7: secret key imported
gpg: key 9140A8C7: *** 1 new signature
gpg: key 5EF4A221: secret key imported
gpg: key 5EF4A221: public key *** imported
gpg: key 46C171A0: secret key imported
gpg: key 46C171A0: public key *** imported
gpg: Total number processed: 3
gpg:               imported: 2
gpg:         new signatures: 1
gpg:       secret keys read: 3
gpg:   secret keys imported: 3

Woo hoo!