PGP

The following article contains the PGP Public Key pertaining to the author of this wiki.

You may contact the author at:

CPI@cock.li

(Address potentially subject to change.)

Because of the nature of the Internet, such as it is, you may wish to keep any conversation to me unable to be read by anyone but me — this could be due to the sensitive nature of the content you're sending me, or simply as an exercise in good Net Communication hygiene (as overkill as it may be). In order to do this, you can e-mail me using PGP, arguably the gold standard for end-to-end encryption1), to obfuscate the contents of your message.

PGP is known for being very effective at the expense of user friendliness, to the point that attempting to concisely explain how to send me an encrypted email with it suddenly becomes a rather difficult task as the step-by-step varies between software, operating systems, implementations… If you have no idea how PGP works, this article explains it rather well.

To make it very short, I have a pair of Public and Private Keys. You use the Public Key to encrypt the message, and I use the Private Key to decrypt it once I receive it. Some e-mail clients, and even some web clients, have their own implementation of PGP which may help you in the process; otherwise, there's still plenty of software that helps you expedite the process of generating key pairs and encrypting/decrypting by hand. For example, I use Kleopatra in both Windows and Linux which is email software-agnostic and could even use it to decrypt text sent through another way; meanwhile, the cock.li mailhost provider suggests Enigmail, which works as a plugin for a handful of email software.

Public Key

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
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=JZo5
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Some Words of Caution, and Some Things of Note

Your email address and subject line are NOT encrypted by PGP and CANNOT be encrypted by PGP. This is a design limitation of the IMAP/SMTP email protocols and not a PGP one.

DO NOT contact me with an e-mail address that could be traced to Personally-Identifiable Information if it is not your intention to do so!

DO NOT put sensitive information in the e-mail's subject line if it is not your intention to do so!

  • If you wish for me to reply in the same fashion, I will also need your PGP Public Key, which you will have to generate along with your Private Key and then send in your email to me2). Make sure you tell me that you're expecting an equally encrypted answer in case the nature of the conversation doesn't make it glaringly obvious. I am not a clever man.
  • The need to add PGP arises mostly out of concern raised by acquaintances regarding my (most likely temporary) choice of e-mail provider, as the structure and organization of cock.li is such that its owner could read my e-mails' content at any given time. To this I concede that it is indeed a true and valid concern: Mr. Canfield of cock.li, or any other individual pertaining to OvO Systems Ltd. who may have direct access to the mailservers could, in theory, go through my email. However, it's imperative that I point out that this is also true of virtually every other email service, and especially those pertaining to major, well-known Internet companies (e.g. GMail and the like). Email protocols per se do not offer encryption services, so your messages could be freely intercepted as they're being sent between servers and downloaded/read by your email client of choice, either by people in charge of these servers or an external malicious actor or actors. There are very few, if any, services that guarantee content-blindness at a server level (so-called “zero access encryption”) so as to be protected from prying eyes even when stored in the servers3). PGP encryption, while cumbersome, remains the best for the purpose of ensuring privacy whether you actually need it or if you simply wish to exercise your entitlement to the privacy of your words.
1)
Perhaps not entirely infallible, but sufficiently bulletproof to not be an issue for essentially 100% of the visitors of this place.
2)
Your Public Key, not your Private Key! Your Private Key is not to be shared! If I have to point this out to you then you may not be ready to use PGP in the first place!
3)
Protonmail offers, or at least claims to offer, this sort of encryption, and has their own PGP implementation; however, most of their features remained paywalled. Lavabit, known for being obliterated by the US Government for providing email services to Edward Snowden, also offered (for a fee) zero-access encryption, but did not have measures to encrypt messages as they traveled using the SMTP protocol.
meta/pgp.txt · Last modified: 2021/03/13 15:18 by Curator
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