Authenticating email

[Trevor Smith]

On Wed, 03 May 2000 17:08:34 +0100 (BST), Simon Bowring wrote:

>or later.  It's also not a hard concept - it's a "signature" which 
>is "digital" and is unique to the combination of sender and the data 

I think part of the problem for new users is it may not be clearly
stated that public key encryption is used for two VERY different
purposes:

signing
and
encrypting

(The technology behind these two things is similar, but as far as an
average person is concerned, they probably seem VERY different. At
least that's the way i see it.)

And really, if you can operate an email program, once you've got your
signature created, you can sign a message (or encrypt/decrypt one).

Even from a command line (where I have had to create my
public/private keypairs because I'm using OS/2), creating keys is
dead simple.


-- 
 Trevor Smith          |          trevor@haligonian.com
 PGP public key available at: www.haligonian.com/trevor

PGP Public Key Fingerprint= A68C C4EC C163 5C0A 6CFA  671F 05D4 0B30 318B AFD6