Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from chapter 11, "Keeping Your Data Private", of Peter van der Linden's Guide to Linux, published August 2005 by Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-187284-2. In Part 1 ...

If you have sent any plaintext confidential emails to someone (most likely you did), have you ever questioned yourself about the mail being tampered with or read by anyone during transit? If not, you ...

Nathan Eddy works as an independent filmmaker and journalist based in Berlin, specializing in architecture, business technology and healthcare IT. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill ...

In the context of cryptography, a public key is an alphanumeric string that serves as an essential component of asymmetric encryption algorithms. It is typically derived from a private key, which must ...

For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience.

Using a set of public/private keys to allow you to log into a remote Linux system or run commands using ssh without a password can be very convenient, but setup is just tad tricky. Here's how and a ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a ...

We don’t know when, but it will happen: Quantum computers will become so powerful that all existing public-key cryptography protections will be quickly crackable. According to Dr. Mark Jackson of ...

The security system that underlies the internet makes use of a curious fact: You can broadcast part of your encryption to make your information much more secure. When you purchase through links on our ...