CentraLUG, 5-Feb-2005: Matt Brodeur and GNU Privacy Guard

[Ted Roche]

We were lucky last night to have Matt Brodeur drive up from his day job 
at RedHat in Westford, MA to present a meeting on GPG, the open source 
implementation of OpenPGP, the Pretty Good Privacy algorithms and 
utilities. Matt had a slideshow in OpenOffice.org 2 Impress (available 
at http://www.nexttime.com/mbrodeur/GPG2007) and in PDF here 
<http://http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/GpG2007> [1].

Eleven attendees made it to the meeting. Matt briefly discussed the 
origins of PGP, and then dove right into the process and utilities of 
how Privacy Guard works. Matt also had brought some scripts he replayed 
to walk through the sequence of generating a key pair, signing another’s 
key, sharing keys to a keyserver. Matt walked us through the concepts 
behind the Web of Trust and the issues and processes of revoking keys. 
During the presentation and following, there were a fair number of 
questions and Matt dealt with them well.

Although we had hoped to have a keysigning as part of the meeting, we 
elected to postpone that portion to future meetings. As the group is 
fairly small, we agreed we can do individual signings as needed.

Future meetings: March 5th will feature Andy Bair talking about “Digital 
Forensics File Carving,” a popular topic he’s presented at several other 
groups. On April 2nd, William Stearns will do a presentation on Logical 
Volume Management. I saw Bill do an LVM presentation at DLSLUG back in 
2005, and he had a great presentation. Looking forward to seeing both 
presentations!

[1] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/GpG2007