Hiding Your Secrets

Ever get the feeling that someone's reading your e-mail? While there are lots of ways to hide your tracks when you're browsing the Web, some people like to know that everything they store on their computer (e-mail, Word files, spreadsheets and so on) is private and for their eyes only. What they need is encryption — a way to scramble their documents so that no one else can read them. Luckily, the advent of powerful desktop computers makes this easy to accomplish. Well, sort of.

So how to begin? The first place to look, especially if your computer is relatively new, is your operating system: PC users running Windows 2000 and Macintosh folks with OS 9 probably know that a relatively strong and easy-to-use form of encryption is part of the system. For everyone else, all you need is a connection to the Net to find a number of free ways to encrypt your stuff. The gold standard for free encryption is Pretty Good Privacy, a downloadable encryption program that's considered so difficult to break, the U.S. government once treated it like munitions and wouldn't allow it to be exported. Now you can, however, download it in a matter of minutes for virtually any kind of computer at www.pgpi.org. PGP, as it's commonly known, uses public-key cryptology, a powerful form of codemaking that relies on two software-based "keys": a public one, which you give out to people so they can encode documents to you, and a private one, which you use to decrypt them. Your private key, by the way, cannot be exported.

Using PGP is actually a bit complicated. After you download the program, you get a 220-page instruction manual that makes "Beowulf" look like fun reading. Don't be discouraged. I read the first few pages to familiarize myself with the concept of encryption keys, as well as basic terms, and then I decided to fiddle with the program on my own. This required a full day.

That said, the installation steps are relatively simple. The first thing you do is create your public and private keys. After loading the program, click on PGPKEYS. Go to keys on top of your menu bar and click NEW. This brings you to the Key Generation Wizard, which guides you through the rest of the process. The program will ask you which type of cryptography you want to use: either Diffie-Hellman or RSA. The Diffie-Hellman model is supposedly stronger encryption than RSA. But since the codes are incompatible, if your friends are using RSA and you select Diffie-Hellman, you will be unable to exchange keys with them. You then have to choose the size of the key you want to generate. Keep in mind that while larger keys are more secure, they are slower. Anywhere from a 1024-bit to a 2048-bit key should be plenty for general security purposes. Finally, the program asks you to create a password for your private key. It's crucial that you remember this password because there's nothing anyone, not even the hot shots in your tech department, can do if you forget it.

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