Integrating Crypto Identities with Android

 Posted on December 28, 2013  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

ver the past couple of years, Android has included a central database for managing information about people, it is known as the ContactsContract (that’s a mouthful). Android then provides the People app and reusable interface chunks to choose contacts that work with all the information in the ContactsContract database. Any time that you are adding an account in the Settings app, you are setting up this integration. You can see it with Google services, Skype, Facebook, and many more. [Read More]
Android  encryption  gnupg  gpg  identity  openpgp  otr  pgp  psst  usability 

Keys, signatures, certificates, verifications, etc. What are all these for?

 Posted on December 12, 2013  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

For the past two years, we have been thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to achieve private communications. One particular focus has been on the “security tokens” that are required to make private communications systems work. This research area is called internally Portable Shared Security Tokens aka PSST. All of the privacy tools that we are working on require “keys” and “signatures”, to use the language of cryptography, and these are the core of what “security tokens” are. [Read More]
encryption  identity  nfc  openpgp  otr  pgp  privacy  psst  qrcode  secure introductions  security  trust  usability 

Getting keys into your keyring with Gnu Privacy Guard for Android

 Posted on December 6, 2013  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

Now that you can have a full GnuPG on your Android device with Gnu Privacy Guard for Android, the next step is getting keys you need onto your device and included in Gnu Privacy Guard. We have tried to make it as easy as possible without compromising privacy, and have implemented a few approaches, while working on others. There are a few ways to get this done right now. Gnu Privacy Guard registered itself with Android as a handler of all the standard OpenPGP MIME types (application/pgp-keys, application/pgp-encrypted, application/pgp-signature), as well as all of the OpenPGP and GnuPG file extensions (. [Read More]
Android  encryption  gnupg  gpg  howto  identity  open source  openpgp  pgp  privacy  psst  security 

GnuPG for Android progress: we have an command line app!

 Posted on May 9, 2013  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

This alpha release of our command-line developer tool brings GnuPG to Android for the first time! GNU Privacy Guard Command-Line (gpgcli) gives you command line access to the entire GnuPG suite of encryption software. GPG is GNU’s tool for end-to-end secure communication and encrypted data storage. This trusted protocol is the free software alternative to PGP. GnuPG 2.1 is the new modularized version of GnuPG that now supports OpenPGP and S/MIME. [Read More]
Android  encryption  gnupg  gpg  oi2  open source  openpgp  pgp  preview  psst 

User scenarios to guide our crypto development

 Posted on April 14, 2012  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

At Guardian Project, we find user-centered development to be essential to producing useful software that addresses real world needs. To drive this, we work with user stories and scenarios as part of the process of developing software. One particular development focus is the Portable Shared Security Token (PSST) project, which aims to make it easy to use encryption across both mobile and desktop computers, as well as keep the stores of cryptographic identities (i. [Read More]
anonymity  encryption  openpgp  otr  privacy  psst  usability  user scenarios  user stories 

On Verifying Identity Using Cryptography

 Posted on March 19, 2012  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

One of the most important uses of cryptography these days is verifying the identity of the other side of a digital conversation. That conversation could be between two people using OTR-encrypted IM, a web browser showing a bank website, a Debian Developer uploading a package to the Debian build server, an ssh client logging into an ssh server, and on and on. In all of these cases, cryptography is used to ensure that the software is indeed receiving replies from the expected entity. [Read More]
crypto  https  identity  openpgp  otr  psst  signing  ssh 

Adventures in Porting: GnuPG 2.1.x to Android!

 Posted on March 15, 2012  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

PGP started with Phil Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy, which is now turned into an open IETF standard known as OpenPGP. These days, the reference OpenPGP platform seems to be GnuPG: its used by Debian and all its derivatives in the OS itself for verifying packages and more. It is also at the core of all Debian development work, allowing the very diffuse body of Debian, Ubuntu, etc developers to communicate and share work effectively while maintaining a high level of security. [Read More]
Android  gnu privacy guard  gnupg  gpg  gpgme  java  jni  native  open source  openpgp  porting  preview  prototype 

How To: Lockdown Your Mobile E-Mail

 Posted on July 9, 2010  |  Derek

Update 2015-04-27: _We now recommend OpenKeychain over APG, the app described in this blog post. The set up is drastically easier, so you probably don’t even need this HOWTO anymore. Start by downloading K-9 and OpenKeychain, then go into OpenKeychain and start the config there._ Over the past few years it’s become increasingly popular to sound the call that ‘email is dead{#y8a0}.’ And while many complementary forms of synchronous and asynchronous communication – from IM to social networking – have evolved since email first came on the scene, it’s hard to see email suddenly disappearing from its role as the most important way organizations communicate. [Read More]
Android  apg  encryption  openkeychain  openpgp  pgp