AfNOG 2006 PGP Key Signing

There will be a PGP key signing party held in JAMBO 1 after lunch (but before the afternoon classes) on Friday 12 May.

PGP is a way to encrypt data and e-mail, so that it cannot be understood by other people. You can also use PGP to sign data and e-mail, so that people who receive it can be sure it really came from you, and that it hasn't been modified by someone else.

There are no tutorials or workshops scheduled on PGP this year. If you don't know much about PGP, and particularly if you have not already generated a PGP key, you may want to find an instructor before Friday and ask them to help you.

Before Friday morning, you should do the following:

  1. Install some PGP software, if you don't already have some. Some reasonable choices are GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG, or GPG, free) and PGP (which is not free). On FreeBSD, you can find GnuPG in the Ports system as security/gnupg.
  2. Generate a PGP key pair, if you have not already done so. This tutorial (aussi en français) might help.
  3. Extract the public key. With GnuPG, you can do this using gpg -a --export <your email address>.
  4. Add your public key to the AfNOG 2006 keyring. The keyring can be found here. Just export your public key as ASCII, and paste it into the form.
  5. Generate your public key's fingerprint, and write it down. With GPG, the way you see your key's fingerprint is to type gpg --fingerprint <your email address>.

On Friday, after lunch, you should do the following:

  1. Go to JAMBO 1 and bring the piece of paper with your key fingerprint.
  2. Make sure you bring some photo I.D., like a passport or a driver's licence. This is to let people verify that you really are who you say you are, and that you are not pretending to be someone else.

More Information about PGP

spangly pgp lock thing