Digitally signing a message helps to ensure it has not been tampered with (providing integrity) and that the sender is who he claims to be (providing non-repudiability), while encrypting a message helps ensure that nobody, except the intended recipient(s), will be able to “see” the message while in transit on the network (providing confidentiality).
Mozilla supports PGP/GPG with the aid of the mozilla-enigmail package, so make sure you install it first, along with the gnupg package and all their needed dependencies, before trying to send secure messages.
The first step consists in creating a GPG key pair. This can be generated within Mozilla through the + menu (Figure 9.12, “GPG Key Generation Options”). When you do this for the first time, a dialog asks if you wish to configure enigmail. Confirm, and in the next dialog that appears you can safely ignore all options and just click the .
Fill in the Passphrase and Passphrase (repeat) fields with a secret passphrase, the Comment field with any string to identify you, and click on the button.
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After clicking on the button, try to make your system perform disk-intensive operations (like actively browsing the web) to increase the “randomness pool” and to speed up key generation. |
It is highly recommended that you publish your public key on specialized servers, for example KeyServer. This way your friends can get your key from there and you can enjoy digital signature and message encryption features.
In the following table we summarize the new buttons Enigmail adds and briefly explain their functions.
Table 9.3. Enigmail Toolbar Buttons