Below you will find my OpenPGP Key Transition notice signaling my intention to migrate from my current key (0x1CD3E3D8) to my new one (0xFEEEFA8F). Note that it is very likely that the software used on this website will render the notice in such a way as to invalidate the signature below. Instead please see the plain text version here to do proper validation against or check out my About Me page for full details.
These days you really need a strong, unique password for almost everything you do online. To make matters even worse for the average user, security nuts will tell you that you actually need a different password for essentially every account you hold. Why? Consider the following scenario:
Little Timmy signs up for Facebook using his super secret password @wesomeS@auce3!. This password is so strong and good that even he can hardly remember it.
Say you are travelling, or are at a neighbourhood coffee shop, using whatever unsecured WiFi network they make available. You could either:
trust that no one is sniffing your web traffic, capturing passwords, e-mails, IMs, etc. trust that no one is using more sophisticated methods to trick you into thinking that you are secure (i.e. man in the middle attack) route your Internet traffic through a secure tunnel to your home PC before going out onto the web, protecting you from everyone at your current location which would you choose?
I logged onto my desktop the other day, for the first time in a couple of weeks – I’ve been away travelling, and was surprised to notice that my PGP key was set to expire. Long story short I have generated a brand new key.
OpenPGP Key
Name: Tyler Burton
Key ID: 0x1CD3E3D8
Key Fingerprint: 96ED 6B13 10B1 69C1 8299 693C 2921 6D80 1CD3 E3D8
Keyserver: pgp.mit.edu
Key Algorithm: RSA
Well GPG to be more accurate 😉
As my existing key was set to expire at the end of this year I have issued myself a brand new one! After much though I finally decided that creating a new key from scratch was the best idea, rather than simply adding a new subkey, because I wanted to move away from DSA/ElGamal toward RSA primarily because of the weakening of SHA1. If this all sounds like gibberish to you then don’t worry, the details aren’t nearly as important as the security provided by my new key.
I would like to start a series of non-regular posts related to basic computer security. Security and cryptography are two areas of computer science that I have a passion for and, unfortunately, are two areas that most computer users do a truly terrible job at. I will try to make these as straight forward as possible so anyone can follow along!
For the record, the suggestions I will be making in these tips are simply things that I have found to work for me.
