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 ...

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.