Signed Emails October 21
I got a personal email certificate from thawte this weekend. I am not sure what made want this, but it is free. For those that are not familiar with what a certificate does for you, it allows you to sign and encrypt your email. Encryption is a nice feature that definitive has a purpose, but do people pay attention to a signed email? A signed email assures the recipient of the email that the sender is who they purport to be. Does anyone pay attention to this? I am curious. It really does not create a lot of work other than getting the certificate.I went a couple of extra steps after getting the certificate. First a standard thawte certificate does not list your name in the common name attribute on the certificate. To get your name in the certificate, you have to get your identity confirmed by some of thawte’s network of notaries. It works off a point system. I was able to get enough points from two notaries this weekend. Then I went the extra step of actually generating my own private key with openssl which comes preinstalled on the mac.The reason for generating my own private and then generating a public key off of it is if thawte had s security breach, then someone could read my encrypted mail and send out encrypted mail posing as me. I thought it was kind of cool to generate my own private key. I followed the directions here.