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I'm currently reading Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother which includes a part about encrypted messaging, and even wrapping messages first in my private key and then your public key.
I'd like to play around with that but from what I've googled so far it seems to be a rather convoluted process, requiring installing several program components, and creating an encrypted message requires doing some manual file manipulation.
I'm surprised that I can't find something like a Firefox plugin that integrates encryption into Gmail. I've seen that there is a Thunderbird PGP plugin, but I don't use T-bird. I also saw a blog post that Google apparently toyed with PGP support in 2009, but nothing has appeared in the meantime.
Question:
To use encryption with Gmail, is there a simpler method than creating a file locally, then encrypting that file, and finally attaching it to a regular Gmail message?
3I'm interested in the solutions to this as well. I've wanted to start using email encryption but it seems there is poor support for it at all outside of 3rd party clients, if at all. I was looking into it for use with Outlook 2010 and just didn't want to try as hard as it seemed was required to even make it function. – Melikoth – 2012-09-27T12:06:54.653
The technical hurdles aside --where will you keep your secret key and how does the browser access it for Google to use-- this, it seems to me, is outside of the their commercial interests. Google, Yahoo, Aol, and others scan your email for data used to develop targeted ads to you and those you send mail to and receive mail from. Large scale support of encrypted mail would make this moot unless the mail were scanned before sending. If that were the case, where's the privacy? – thisfeller – 2012-09-27T12:18:27.190
2@thiseller: interesting points! I see that crypto goes against commercial interests, that might explain why that Gmail PGP thing never arrived. And where to store the keys ... I don't even understand where to put them without Firefox so I can't answer that :) – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun – 2012-09-27T12:26:50.310
1@thisfeller You could beat them by having a pseudo message, maybe created by Eliza or similar, and have the encrypted message as attachment. – ott-- – 2012-10-30T20:41:01.753
1Little Brother got me started on this track too! – ptim – 2013-11-05T01:49:18.653