Flashes of Panic

I may have to take back my earlier comments on the difficulty of setting up public-key encryption in Windows. So far, WinPT is pretty darn cool. Some of the features are a little patchy yet, but I can take an encrypted file and hit Alt-Shift-D and get plaintext. (Well, a passphrase prompt first, and then plaintext.)

I think it’s time to document this and plan for installation; the only places the plaintext is held in memory are (a) the text-entry buffer of the sender’s browser, (b) RAM on the server, and (c) the recipient’s machine, if they save a decrypted version. That presents a much greater challenge for an attacker. (And, to a degree, security is all about reducing risk, not eliminating it; you think of crime as like a flood, and put things out of reach of the ten-year flood or the fifty-year flood, but the hundred-year flood… well, once in a hundred years maybe you can handle getting wet.)

To do lists, software installation, documentation, etc… I suspect if I tell you about all my work projects like this, I’ll lose all four of my readers.