On Friday 26 April 2002 18:31, Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, E.L. Willighagen wrote:
How is this different from PGP/GPG signatures? Is it the same? These signitures do not cost me $150 and I can sign and encrypt documents in my email program too...
The technology is similiar. You can create self-signed certs with http://www.openssl.org/ quite easily. See below for simple instructions
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.2-Manual/custom-guide/s1-in stallation-selfsigned.html
The idea of certs is built on trust. In absence of a web of trust in the scientific community (because the average scientist is too dense to grok basic concepts of trust and public key cryptography) you rely on an authority -- Thawte/Verisign in this case -- doing the work for you.
Inasmuch the authority exercises the proper diligence to verify your identity (by relating to already existing trust agencies, as e.g. verifying your photo ID since Thawte can't possibly know every John Doe) is everybody's guess.
The Debian (www.debian.org) community has very strict rules for setting up a web of trust, and it works very good. GPG/PGP keys can be verified and signed by other people as so-called keysigning parties/meetings. At those sessions the attending people exchange key signatures and show their passports for identification. As such it works similar like the proces Verisign works (as I understand). Debian packages are also signed with the keys of the developer that uploaded the package. I guess it is all politics which key signing software is supported by Acrobat, Office XP etc, but it would be nice if it would support such signs too... (yes, i know that will not likely happen) BTW, an Outlook plugin for PGP is available (http://www.pgpi.org/). I think it is even included in the PGP distribution. Egon chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)