Secure communication with Jabber and GnuPG
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The communication is an important thing. The value of information should not be underestimated. It is especially unpleasant to realise that your bank account is empty just because someone sniffed your password. Yup a bit dark but trully real.
And so for you to be kind of protected from such things in internet it is advisable to use encryption. In todays article we will talk about a way to protect your comunication chanel called instant messaging a.k.a. IM. For the grief of lot’s of people we wont describe protection for any and all protocols but just for one, namely jabber
The Idea
The idea is to encrypt our messages using asymetric encryption (in the main role staring GnuPG) and then to stuff them in the Jabber network. The used (tested) klients are Gajim, PSI. For other clients go looking in the net.
The solution
We asume that you already have everything necessaary, i.e. jabber client which supports GnuPG and GnuPG itself.
The first step is to generate our private key. It is advised the key to be small for speed. it is also advisable to generate new key specially for the chatting.
There are a lot of different tools but we are going to use the console based gpg.
gpg --batch --gen-key params
In the file params are the parameters needed for the key generation. More information on the file format can be found at gen-key non-interactively
example file
Key-Type:DSA
Key-Length:1024
Key-Usage:encrypt,sign
Passphrase:parola
Name-Real:test1
Name-Email:test1@jabber.org
Name-Comment:jabber encryption
%commit
Now we have a key. So we have to hook it to our client.
This is accomplished from the settings of our account
For PSI
For Gajim
After we have informed our client for the key we should now upload the public part of it to the keyservers and preferably to some public place.
The last step is to assign public keys to the people we will chath with. Of course it is neccessary to acquire this keys somehow, but as we encouraged you should have already published them.
The assigning of the public keys is done in the menu for the contact himself.
For PSI
For Gajim
And finaly we can start to chat safely. To do this we need to just enable the encryption by clicking the padlock icon in the chat window
For PSI
For Gajim
Well, that’s all folks. Now you can securely chat with some people.
