On Tuesday 14 December 2004 11:14, Brian Kelsay wrote:
That, my friend, was an awesome post. This may sound like a simple thing to you, since you have been dealing with encryption for a while, but have you thought of doing a detailed write-up and sample scripts to get a person new to encryption started? That would be a cool thing to post to http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/documentation/howtos.html or as a small project on freshmeat. (e.g. Encrypted Jumpdrive/Pendrive Howto) Just a thought. Yes, the attempt to be cross-platform is usually the wrench in the works.
*chuckle* Thanks for the compliment! I'll add that to my list of awesome-projects-I'll-get-to-someday-soon. ;)
I have seen some real small USB fobs that I think only carry an encryption key. They are only about a half inch long or just a bit more. Have you seen those and do they work in Linux? If they work, they might be just the thing. I imagine that if you look at them in Linux, you will find that they only contain a fat16 filesystem with 1-8 MB of flash, maybe less. A private key takes up how much space if it is in a text file or compressed? Not much, maybe a few kb.
Yea, it's just a few KB. Even the simplest storage device would work -- the goal should be making it separate from the device on your keychain and very easy to _not_ forget. Losing your private key is a very nasty proposition -- publishing revocation certificates is _not_ a fun thing.