Encryption

[Trom]

I ran a Fidonet BBS back in the early 90's, and one of the downloads I encouraged as well as many other sysops was Phil Zimmerman's PGP. Why would you send a letter without an envelope, he would ask. Many people used PGP, but as time marched on, PGP became commercialized, and GPG became the standard. Since then, there's a bunch Email and text encryption apps that don't require key rings and such, just know the password. I have my favorites with my friends, but what are yours? Is there an encryption app that is easiest? Best? I'd really like to know.

 

[mikedt]

I ran a Fidonet BBS back in the early 90's, and one of the downloads I encouraged as well as many other sysops was Phil Zimmerman's PGP. Why would you send a letter without an envelope, he would ask.

You might have actually, and many people did. It's called sending a postcard. Of course you wouldn't send a postcard for anything important, or private, etc.

Many people used PGP, but as time marched on, PGP became commercialized, and GPG became the standard. Since then, there's a bunch Email and text encryption apps that don't require key rings and such, just know the password. I have my favorites with my friends, but what are yours? Is there an encryption app that is easiest? Best? I'd really like to know.

Many people I know, like my father etc, we use Signal for our private messaging.
https://www.signal.org/
State-of-the-art end-to-end encryption (powered by the open source Signal Protocol) keeps your conversations secure.

 

[Trom]

One of the things I like about Signal, which I do use, is that it can replace the stock messaging app, yet if one of your contacts also uses Signal, those texts will be encrypted. The problem is other people; they just don't seem to care about privacy.

Where encryption is most important to me is in email, same concept, different app. There are several people that I speak with that agree with privacy, one of them is a gpg priest, one guy uses SSE. Another guy just talks to me I would love to corral these guys into one app, Signal would be great, but we're talking email. Recently, I found a really easy to use app called Alkemi, and the author puts his code up for evaluation, but I'm not a geek. SSE is also fairly easy to use, gpg is out of the question for reasons unknown, I could never figure out the laziness involved in the unwillingness to create a friggen key.

Anyway, all that aside, best and easiest encryption apps?

 

[svim]

I'm also a big fan of Signal Private Messenger but for email I use the K-9 Mail app on my phone. It's an Open Source project (no ties to any corporate interests) that's been around since 2008, almost as long as Android itself. With the OpenKeychain app, also Open Source, this adds OpenPGP support. But as you've pointed out, the problem is often the recipient is usually the issue -- encryption depends on an exchange of encryption keys on both ends so actual secure exchanges of email or text messages only take place with a few of my contacts.
K-9 Mail
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl=en_US
OpenKeychain
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.sufficientlysecure.keychain&hl=en_US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenKeychain

 

[Davdi]

Same here, nobody else seems interested (BTW my degree is a bachelor's in Computer Security & Forensics) and I'm a bit of an open source evangelist (The only windows in my home are the glass sort in the walls.)