What is Encryption?

Using data encryption tools, you can jumble the data you need to send before you press the send button. When the intended recipient gets the data, she can decrypted it using the common password provided by you and view the message safely. FireGPG is one such tiny tool that comes in the form of a Firefox extension and is extremely simple to use. Using this nifty tool, you can not only encrypt and decrypt whole messages but also parts of text within a message being sent. Currently, it works only with Gmail and it blends well with the Gmail interface quite seamlessly.

Before you download FireGPG, you will need to download and install WinPT, short for Windows Privacy Tools. This facilitates easy encryption with the help of OpenPGP based software such as FirePGP. You can download both these tools from http:// firegpg.tuxfamily.org (go to the ‘Install’ section).

After you have installed WinPT, install FireGPG—the latter will be shown as an addon in the Firefox-Tools menu. Once you have installed both the tools, open WinPT to insert your email and password details.

Let’s say you need the text inside an email to be encrypted. To do this click on ‘compose mail’ in Gmail and type in the text. Now select the whole text, right-click and move down to FireGPG. This will invoke a menu which will allow you to sign, encrypt and decrypt messages. Click on ‘crypt’: this will open the public key box. Select the email you want encrypted and click ‘ok-ok’. Notice the buttons that get added to the Gmail interface at the bottom of the screen, next to the discard button. You can use these buttons to encrypt your emails. The only thing to keep in mind here is that the user on the other end too will need to have this tool installed to view the messages.

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