Muenster university's cerificate authority (WWUCA)
Having a conversation with others via the internet, whether via e-mail with friends or via WWW with a web server, can be very accurately compared to writing post cards. Anyone with a little know how can
- look at the post card, in other words read along,
- draw something on the post card, in other words change it,
- send post cards under a false name, in other words fake them.
WWW and e-mail software that is up to date offer you the possibility to encode and to electronically sign your conversation, thereby protecting it from being read along, changed or faked.
For encoding and controling the signature, the software needs your counterpart's so called public key, which is provided with a certificate; this is an electronic authentication which states that the public key actually belongs to your counterpart.
Muenster university's certificate authority generates that kind of certificate, as well for OpenPGP keys as for S/MIME keys. The following directions describe how to get a certificate pair of keys, how to teach this to your e-mail client and how to sign, encode and decode e-mails and check signatures (only available in German).
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Mozilla Thunderbird
(S/MIME): A crucial component of Mozilla Thunderbird
is encoding and signing with S/MIME. Unfortunately, it is quite an effort to transfer a certified pair of keys obtained via Mozilla Firefox to Thunderbird and then activate it there. Afterwards, the user-friendliness is hard to outperform, though. -
perMail
(OpenPGP): The central webmailer perMail of Muenster university has been containing a well-engineered PGP support for years, by which encoding and signing is very easily done.
Date: 14.07.2009
