#GPG SUITE FROM GPGTOOLS HOW TO#
#GPG SUITE FROM GPGTOOLS INSTALL#
#GPG SUITE FROM GPGTOOLS SOFTWARE#
#GPG SUITE FROM GPGTOOLS PASSWORD#

The suite includes the GPG keychain which allows you to create your key-pair for your email address, and it also allows you to store the public keys of your recipients & to upload your public keys to public key servers.

#GPG SUITE FROM GPGTOOLS INSTALL#

On OSX/ OS Sierra you can use the free & open source GPG Suite to install the tools required to start encrypting email. This allows encrypted communication between both parties. Both sender & receiver need to set up a keypair & share their public keys with each other.

#GPG SUITE FROM GPGTOOLS PASSWORD#

This password allows you to unlock your keys & use them to encrypt your email. I won’t go into the technicals of it, if you are interested there are a lot of free resources which will guide you through the technology.Įncryption also requires a password to be set when creating your key pair. The keys are paired so that both are required to encrypt & decrypt emails. It is important that your private (secret) key always remains private & you never share it with anyone. Each user generates a pair of keys, one private key remains secret and on the user’s computer, the other, known as a public key is free to distribute on the internet and allows you to pass it on to those you wish to communicate with. GPG is important for emails as it means that an email remains encrypted between the sender & the receiver. I Use RSA 4096 for my keys which is possibly a little overkill, but I like to future proof when learning. These keys use a high level of encryption. Both PGP and GPG are interchangeable so you can use either protocol.

#GPG SUITE FROM GPGTOOLS SOFTWARE#

We will use GPG which stands for GNU Privacy Guard and is a compatible free software equivalent of Symantec’s proprietary encryption algorithm. The program will then encrypt the files and you will receive a file called like part of my cybersecurity posts I’ve decided to write briefly about PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption of email. After this select the receiver of the files.

Right-click the file and go to Services -> OpenPGP: Encrypt File. Encrypting filesĪfter both participants have imported the public key of the other person, you can start encrypting the file.

You can open the document and copy the content and the program will automatically import the public key or you import it by opening GPG suite and press on 'Import' on top. You should never ever share your private key! After sharing your public key with your colleague he needs to follow the same procedure and send you their public key. The easiest is to export it as a file and send it to the other person on Slack. You can right-click on the key in the program and you have several options to share the key. As we have learned in the video we need to share our public key somehow. Screenshot of generating a key pair in GPG SuiteĪfter this, you can find your key in the list. You can find the installer on the homepage: GPG suite setupįirst, you need to download the program on your Mac. It explains the concept quite well and we can see that both of the participants need to have a private key to make the encryption work, but no stress - this will be solved by GPG Suite.

The best explanation which I have found is this video: To explain this procedure an own blog article would be needed but there are a lot of resources out there which can be used. This standard is an implementation of private-public-key encryption. It is an implementation of the OpenPGP protocol which implements the standard RFC4880. Before using the tool we should understand how the techniques used by this program are working. There is a solution for this on macOS though which is called GPG suite. This can be dangerous and that is why files should be encrypted. When not encrypted, then Slack will have access to the file in one way or the other. In normal cases, this file is then shared on the company internal slack. Imagine a CSV file to be shared which is looking similar to this: file includes a lot of private customer data which should not be shared to 3rd-party software. When customer data is involved this process is becoming security-relevant. In every company, files are shared in some kind of way.

#GPG SUITE FROM GPGTOOLS HOW TO#

How to share files securely with GPG suite

Gpg suite from gpgtools