Public Encryption Keys for Celeritous eStore and Blog

With the rapidly increasing amount of credit card fraud and identity theft, like most e-Commmerce retailers we have had to continually ratchet up the verification bar on our automated credit card processing system. It has reduced the fraudulent use attempts, but has also created problems for some overseas customers who have been unable, for whatever reason, to satisfy the automated address verification checking when using a credit card. Our normal recommendation is for them to set up a Paypal account which is normally a bit more forgiving and they do not have to share any credit card information with us.

Since we started our online store we have accepted telephone and FAX transmission of credit card information in addition to the online processing. We have always advised customers not to send us order and credit card information via email as being insecure.

We have just added a new feature to accept secure information from our more intrepid customers including credit card information using encrypted email. I am publishing the public encryption keys for both the eStore email address as well as for the blog address. You may also obtain these from a keyserver such as the MIT Keyserver or the OpenPGP Keyserver.

I personally have been using PGP email encryption off and on since its introduction by Phil Zimmerman in the early 90's. I haven't had a chance or reason to work with it the last couple of years so I spent a few hours this weekend re-educating myself on the latest open source software, tools and plug-ins available for email encryption.

I have gone through and revoked my old personal 1024 bit RSA encryption key from the mid 90's and generated updated keys for my personal account as well as the Celeritous eStore and this blog. They are all newer 2048 bit RSA key pairs and have been published to the above keyservers.

These programs use asymmetric or public/private key pairs so that if you encrypt an email to me using my public key, only I can decrypt it using a combination of my private key and a pass phrase. Likewise, if I encrypt an email to you using your public key, only you can decrypt it using your private information. There are many other possibilities and variation on this too deep to go into here, but there are a lot of resources out there to help explain it all. The listed software sites and documentation are a good place to start.

My main interest was in finding a plug-in for either Seamonkey (successor to the Mozilla Suite) or Thunderbird. We abandoned Internet Exploder and Outlook about 5 years ago here and avoid their use if at all possible. I finally decided on the combination of GnuPG, GPG4Win and Enigmail. All are GPL licensed products and installed effortlessly on Windows and can also be used on Linux platforms (excluding GnuPG4WIN). Key generation had to be done in advanced mode to prevent using the default DSA/ELG Key/Subkey pair. The keys were easily tested by sending test messages between accounts before publishing them to the Keyservers.

So there you have it. Below are the public keys for estore-at-celeritous-dot-com for orders, credit information and blog-at-celeritous-dot-com for those of you who just want to try it out. With the ever increasing loss of privacy it is a tool you should seriously consider adding to your internet arsenal alongside your anti-virus software, firewall and Malware protection programs. All of the programs mentioned above have excellent documentation and getting started guides. GPG4Win also comes with an Outlook plug-in if you haven't made the switch to Thunderbird yet.

Public Encryption Key for blog-at-celeritous-dot-com

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
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=rPen
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Public Encryption Key for estore-at-celeritous-dot-com

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
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=ZizH
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

So go download and play around with it and send me your first secret message that even Echelon will have trouble digesting.