This event is organized by the NLnet foundation

NGI webinar on future of OpenPGP

State-of-the-art work on chains of trust

This freely accessible online event on November 23 from 10 to 11:30 CET organized by NGI Assure dives into the future of OpenPGP encryption. Researchers and developers funded by different NGI programmes discuss their work on PGP-related technology and how to advance the state of art in decentralized trust.

Despite the rise of mobile messengers and chat apps, email continues to be an integral communication channel on the internet. But like core internet technologies, email was not designed with privacy and security in mind. To combat growing problems like phishing, spam and surveillance, various methods of encryption provide confidentiality, authentication and integrity of data. OpenPGP is a widely used email encryption standard (defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 4880 ) derived from Phil Zimmermann’s PGP . Implementations of OpenPGP are used for a wide range of purposes, to sign, encrypt and decrypt texts, emails, files, directories and disks. OpenPGP-compatible systems also allow users to create their own ‘web of trust’ , where people accumulate and sign each others keys for trusted communication without a central point of authority.

Decentralized encryption, authentication and integrity checking are important requirements for trustworthy communication and data handling. That is why the Next Generation Internet initiative funds various R&D-projects that advance the state of art in OpenPGP-implementations and chains of trust. In this freely accessible online event OpenPGP-projects funded by NGI Assure and NGI0 PET present and discuss their ongoing work, and think about the future of the technology they contribute to.

Want to know more? No prior registration is needed, simply join the online webinar on Tuesday November 23rd at 10:00 CET. The event is organized using BigBlueButton , an open source webconferencing framework which is actively supported by NGI Zero to add end-to-end encrypted chat .

Presentations (5-10 min)

• Neal H. Walfield — An introduction to Sequoia PGP
• Wiktor Kwapisiewicz — Add support for trusted platform modules (TPM) to Sequoia PGP
• Heiko Schaefer — Developing and hardening an OpenPGP certificate authority for group trust management
• Lars Wirzenius — Adding and improving command line, programming interface and acceptance test suite to Seqouia PGP
• Justus Winter — Drop-in replacement for widely used encryption software GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard)
• Uli Fouquet — Add plug & play encryption to customer relationship management system
• muppeth — GnuPG-based email encryption for emails at rest
• Yarmo Mackenbach — Decentralized platform to manage online identities verifiably signed with OpenPGP

Discussion, questions and answers (30 min)

• Talking points:
• What have been the clear blockers to mass adoption of OpenPGP? Are we on the way to solve them?
• Which challenges in usability and accessibility have not yet been solved?
• How do we securely scale the web of trust?