If you are a citizen of the United States or Canada go to this address: http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html, go approximately at the middle of the page until you will find “ How to obtain PGP Freeware from MIT”.
In this table you have to download according to your system operator: Win95/98/NT/2000 and click on the link “download”. The next page is a form that you have to read and answer. Click on submit at the end.
On the next page go down and click on the correspondent link and will appear the window to download. It’s going to take more or less, 30 minutes depending on the speed of your conection.
Because this is a “zip” file you have to unzip or unpack it with a software like WinZip or Windows Commander. After that you just have to install the program following the instructions.
If you are not a citizen of the United States or Canada, download the version PGP 6.02 from this site, click here!
Understanding PGP:
What the program does, is encrypt your documents: email, pictures, word, excel, power point documents, etc. You can encrypt any document that you want to be sent through the computer. If the message gets intercepted it will be impossible to be read it if the recipient doesn't have the right key to open it.
An encrypted document means that is scrambled in a way that nobody can read it if he doesn’t have the right key to put it back together.
To be able to use PGP, the sender and receiver, both have to have PGP installed in the computer and have each other’s public keys. When you receive an encrypted message with PGP it will automatically open a window asking for your password. As soon as you type this in, the message will open and you can read it normally.
To be able to use PGP, you have to create a pair of keys. One will be your “secret or private key” with your password that the program will use to open the encrypted document sent to you. This secret key has to be kept secret because if somebody has it, he will be able to open your encrypted documents. The other "public key”, will be used to encrypt any document that somebody wants to send to you. You can give it to anybody that you want to have correspondence. Doesn't matter if a third person has it, the only thing that he can do is encrypt documents that can be opened only with your secret key. Even you can put your public key in an Internet public server for anybody to download and send encrypted documents to you.
When you have created a key pair they will appear in the PGP keys window, a new key with a little face on it. This is your key pair. After that you have to extract you public key to give it to other people. To do that select your key pair and click on the menu “Keys / Export”, will appear a windows asking where you want to save the file that has your public key (the name that you give to your key and the extension, asc, [ yourname.asc ] ). This is the file that you have to send to others).
To send encrypted documents to other people you have to have their public key and tell the program that you want to encrypt your document with this specific public key. For example to send an encrypted email to John, if you are using Eudora or Outlook, these programs have an icon of PGP in their menu and after finishing your email, just click on the icon to encrypt it and the PGPkeys window will appear for you to choose the public key that the program will use to encrypt the email. You just ‘select’ this person’s ‘public key’ and your email will be encrypted using this person’s encryption algorithm.
If you are using other email programs that don’t have the icon, you will have to encrypt the document through the “PGPtools” window and clicking on the icon “Encrypt”. A window will open asking you which document you want to encrypt and it will be saved in the same directory of your original document. You have to send it like an attachment.
PGP can also encrypt sections of your hard drive. You can separate file directories and even entire programs into an encrypted section of your computer that is hidden from the normal directory. To do this, read the instructions for the ‘PGP Disk’ on the pop-up menu.
How to start:
Once downloaded onto your computer, the program will install an icon (a gray padlock) on the bottom-right side of the screen, in your task bar. Give a click in it and in the menu that appears, click "launch PGP keys”.
All the keys that appear in the window are sample keys where you can experiment with them and delete them if you want. In doing this you won’t get confused with the good keys you want to use.
From this window you can manage your keys and create your own pair of keys. It’s all automatic, just follow the prompts.
This program has quite a good “help” section where you can find the way to do any operation that you need. For example, to find how to create a pair of keys, open “help” on the menu of the window and type “creating” on Index or Find and select “creating a key pair”, click on display and follow the instructions.
Also in “Contents” (we still are in Help), you can find all the instructions to understand a little bit more the program and how to manage all the functions.
Once you are set up, using the program is incredibly easy, just point and click! And once you have the ability to communicate in a high level of security, you will wonder why you never did it sooner!
(PGP KEY) To be able to start the encrypted communication download our PGP key! The text of the encrypted key will display on your screen, just highlight and copy the whole text to the the clipboard, after click on your pgp icon on the bottom right of your computer screen and select the option 'Ad key from the clipboard' and follow the instructions. |
