playing with cryptography...

[Charly Avital]

Ramon Loureiro wrote the following on 5/2/08 3:52 AM:
> Hi
> I just have ask for an email certificate to thawte.com thinking that 
> it's handled  like a GPG signature (I thought that I'll have something 
> like a GPG certified signature)
> Now I have the certificate.... I have installed it  in Explorer and  
> Firefox...-by the way, I don't understand why it is associated to the 
> browser and not to the email program-
> I'm certified... but I don't know what can I do with this or how can 
> apply to my emails?
> 
> Once again, excuse my ignorance.
> 
> ___
> ramon

Ramon,

This message has again a bad signature:
gpg: Signature made Fri May  2 03:52:49 2008 EDT using RSA key ID 80C7D647
gpg: BAD signature from "Ramon Loureiro <ramon.loureiro at upf.edu>"

Thawte's certificates can be used both for signing and for encrypting,
using S/MIME, and they are not at all like gpg keys.

Your correspondent also must be using S/MIME to be able to verify your
signature, and to decrypt/encrypt using those certificates.

gpg 2.* is S/MIME compliant.

You should be able to import into Thunderbird the e-mail certificate
that was issued to you by Thawte: go to Account Settings/Security, and
try to use the available options.

As far as I am concerned, there's no ignorance here to be excused. I am
an ignorant empirical user, and I may be as ignorant, or more than most
of this list's learned members.

Take care,
Charly
MacOS 10.5.2 - MacBook Intel C2Duo - GnuPG 1.4.9 - GPG2 2.0.9 -
Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 - Enigmail 0.95.6