Therefore you should choose a long and complicated passphrase that will be difficult to guess. If your key ever falls into the hands of an adversary, this passphrase will be the only thing protecting your encrypted data from being unlocked. When you are satisfied with the settings, click 'Generate'.Ī small window will pop up requesting that you set a passphrase to protect your key with. It makes sense to leave that set at the default, which is 4 years in the future. There is an ability to set an expiration date for your key. With the increase in CPU power in recent years, it doesn't make sense to choose anything less than 4096 bits. The larger the key size, the longer it would take to 'brute force' the encrypted materials. In the GPG Keychain Access window, click on the triangle next to "Advanced Options" and change the key size to 4096 bits. Once the installation is complete, you will be presented with a window titled "GPG Keychain Access". This will install the GPG suite on your computer.Ĭlick "continue", then click "install". This time however, instead of dragging the application to install it, you need to double click on the "Installer" application which looks like an open box. After a few seconds, a folder will open up containing the GPG suite installer. Now you will follow similar actions as in the previous step: click on the archive to open it. The file will download and once the download completes, the GPG suite archive should be in your downloads folder. Scroll down to where there is a button that says "Download GPG suite" and click on that button. This will install the application on your system. Simply drag the Thunderbird icon onto the Applications Folder icon that is also inside the folder. If you have ever installed a Mac OS X application this next step should be familiar to you. After a few seconds, a folder will open up containing the Thunderbird application. It will go through several stages: verifying, checking volumes, mounting. Click on the archive to open it.Ī dialog box will open up saying something like "Opening Thunderbird 24.0.dmg". Once the download completes, the Thunderbird archive should be in your downloads folder, which is accessible from the task bar at the bottom of your screen. Go to and click the green button to begin downloading Thunderbird. Step 1: Download and install Mozilla Thunderbird It is possible to encrypt email attachments ( files you attach to your email ) but you need to pay special attention to the informational dialog boxes to make sure that you are doing what you intend. In other words, adversaries may still be able to figure out who you are emailing with, the subject line of your email and other information such as the frequency of your communications or the size of your encrypted messages. However it does not solve the issue of meta-data. Encrypting your emails with GPG is a countermeasure against interception of the contents of the email by 3rd parties. GPG can be used to encrypt many types of files but in this tutorial we will focus on its most common use which is for encrypting email.Įnigmail is a plug-in for Mozilla Thunderbird which adds support for encrypting and decrypting emails to make the process easier. GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) is a free, open source cross-platform alternative to the " Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) suite of cryptographic software. Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform email client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. For further reading see the Wikipedia entry on public-key cryptography. Conversely, you should never give your private key to anyone unless you want them to be able to read your encrypted email or files. It is OK to give out your public key to others. The public key is used to encrypt plaintext or to verify a digital signature whereas the private key is used to decrypt encrypted text or to create a digital signature. The key pair consists of two parts: the public key and the private key. This tutorial will guide you through installing and configuring several pieces of software which can be used to protect the content of your email from interception by 3rd parties by using encryption.ĭuring this tutorial you will generate a "key pair" for encrypting files. This document is intended to help people quickly get started encrypting their email on Mac OS X
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