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1 \input texinfo
2
3 @setfilename WinPT
4
5 This file describes the Windows Privacy Tray program and its main functions
6
7 This file is free under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2.
8
9 Copyright (C) 2006 Timo Schulz
10
11 Version 0.0.0
12
13 @settitle WinPT - The Windows Privacy Tray; a free GPG front-end for Windows
14
15 @section Requirements for WinPT
16
17 First you need to have a working GnuPG 1.4 installtion on the machine you
18 plan to install WinPT. If you don't have GPG in your machine, please
19 visit http://www.gnupg.org and download the latest GPG version there.
20 It comes with a graphical installer so there is no need to do this
21 step manually.
22
23 You need at least Windows 98/2K/XP, but Windows XP or better is
24 recommend. The program also works on NT/95/ME but there is no support
25 for these OS versions any longer.
26
27 @section A short Introduction
28
29 WinPT is a graphical GnuPG front-end which resides in the task bar.
30 It is divided into several, so-called, managers. There is a manager
31 for the keyring, for files and for smart cards. The aim of the program
32 is to secure email communication and to perform file encryption.
33
34 @subsection What is GnuPG
35 GnuPG is a tool for secure communication and data storage.
36 It can be used to encrypt data and to create digital signatures.
37 It includes an advanced key management facility and is compliant
38 with the proposed Internet standard as described in RFC2440.
39
40 @subsection The Web of Trust
41 For a detailled description of these and other GnuPG topics, I
42 recommend the available literature at http://www.gnupg.org. But
43 at least a general overview should be given here.
44
45 The certification scheme of OpenPGP does not base on a hirachical
46 approach. Instead it uses a combination of ownertrust and direct
47 key certification. Here is an example with Alice, Bob, Carol and Dave.
48
49 Alice knows Bob and checked the fingerprint of Bob's key when he
50 met him personally. Thus she knows that the key really belongs to
51 its owner and he trusts Bob to certify other keys. Then she issued
52 a signature on Bob's key. Bob knows Carol and also checked her identity.
53 Then he signed her key. Alice does not know Carol, but he knows Bob
54 and Bob trusts Carol. And because Alice trusts Bob, at a level she
55 decided before, he also trusts Carol. It's a transitiv relation.
56 Dave is isolated and does not know anybody from the mentioned persons,
57 thus he is not in the WoT.
58 Another very important point is, that the signer can decide,
59 after the certification, how much he trusts the key owner to
60 certify other keys.
61
62 It is very important to check the identify of a key owner. Mostly
63 this is done by comparing the fingerprint, which were submitted
64 by phone or written down at a personal meeting, with the fingerprint
65 of the key in the keyring. Please bear in mind that anybody can create
66 a key with an email address and a specific name. Thus it is not
67 recommend to sign keys without doing this check before!
68
69 The fingerprint of the key is hexadecial (160-bit) sequence divided
70 into 10 groups of 4 hex digits. You can get the fingerprint of a key
71 by opening the key property dialog. There you can mark the fingerprint
72 and copy it to the clipboard.
73
74 Example: 1D75 8108 5BC9 D9FB E78B 2078 ED46 81C9 BF3D F9B4
75
76 @section Installation of the Program
77
78 It is always recommend to use the latest version of the program. You
79 can download it from http://wald.intevation.org/projects/winpt.
80 Download the zip file with the binaries inside and unpack them in
81 a folder. All files need to be in the same folder, so if you change
82 the folder don't forget to move all files.
83 You should also download and verify the signature of the packet to
84 make sure that the release is really authentic.
85
86 To activate the program you just need to start WinPT.exe. You should
87 now see a little (golden key) icon in the taskbar which indicates that
88 the program is running. If you want to quit the program, right click
89 on the symbol and select "Exit".
90
91 Alternative, you may use one of the graphical GPG installers which
92 are available on the internet. I recommend to use Gpg4Win which
93 includes a set of very useful privacy tools, beside WinPT and it
94 is very easy to use with an average size (~4MB). For non-German
95 speaking users, I recommend the light version because it does not
96 contain the 2 German PDF manuals.
97
98 @subsection Getting the Source of the Program
99 As free software, according to the GNU General Public License,
100 WinPT also offers the source code for the program. It can be used
101 for reviews, to compile your own binary and/or to modify and/or
102 redistribute it or just to learn how it works. The source is available
103 at the same place you downloaded the binary. If not, you should
104 contact the author of the site.
105 The entire program can be build with free software; the default
106 environment is a cross-compiler hosted on a Linux box. All you
107 need is the mingw32 packages, a working autoconf environment
108 and the libs WinPT depends on (currently gpgme and libgpg-error).
109 It is also possible to build the binary with cygwin/mingw32 on
110 Windows but this environment is not actively supported and propably
111 needs adjustment of the source.
112
113 @subsection Configure the Program
114 After the installation not much of the default settings need to
115 be changed. If you prefer a special keyserver, it is propably a good
116 idea to open the keyserver dialog and to set one of the existing
117 keyservers as the default or create a new entry and mark it as the
118 new default. The default keyserver is subkeys.pgp.net, which is
119 the best choice for most users.
120
121 @subsection GPG Options
122 For expert users, the GPG preference dialog might contain some
123 interesting options. For example to set the expiration date of
124 a signature and/or to set the signing level for key signing.
125 It also allows to set a default 'encrypt-to' key and to set
126 the comment in ASCII armored files.
127
128 @subsection Preferences
129 In the WinPT preference dialog, the user can modify and/or disable
130 the default options. For new users it is suggested to leave the
131 default values as they are, except when there are problems related
132 to the hotkeys.
133
134 To enable keyring backups, the user can either decide to use the
135 GPG home directory as the backup folder or any other folder. In
136 the latter case, a folder needs to be chosen.
137
138
139 @section The First Start
140
141 This section is only important for people who never installed
142 and/or used WinPT before.
143
144 When the program is started the first time, it offers two choices.
145 The one is to generate a key pair and the other is to copy
146 existing GPG keyrings into the current installation.
147
148 We assume the user will select the first entry.
149
150 Now a new dialog is shown which requests some information from
151 the user to allow a meaningful association between the key and
152 the user. If the user prefer RSA keys, the check box should be marked.
153 If the entered data is OK, WinPT then generates a new key pair. As long
154 as this step takes, a progress dialog is shown to indicate the
155 enduring process. When the generation of the keypair is done, WinPT
156 offers the chance to backup the existing keyrings. This is definitely
157 an important decision because if the keyring will get corrupted
158 or lost, there is no way to recover the encrypted data. That is
159 why it is also important to store the backup, at least of the
160 secret keyring, at a @strong{safe} place.
161
162 @section Keyserver Access
163
164 An easy way to retrieve keys is the keyserver. You can think of
165 it like a huge database with a lot of keys as its content. It is
166 possible to search keys by a pattern, a keyid or even a fingerprint.
167 WinPT allows to access different kind of keyservers. For example
168 LDAP, HKP, Finger and HTTP. But the focus will be set on HKP because
169 this is the common case.
170
171 In some situations WinPT asks the user whether to retrieve keys
172 automatically. One example is the signature verification when the
173 key that issued the signature was not found in the keyring.
174
175 The main keyserver dialog allows to fetch one or more keys directly
176 or to search for a given pattern.
177
178 @subsection Retrieve a key by Key ID
179 The best way to fetch a key from the server is by the key ID.
180 Just enter the key ID, it is always a good idea to prefix it
181 with 0x and click the "Receive" button.
182
183 An example:
184
185 pattern: 0xBF3DF9B4
186
187 [Receive]
188
189
190 @subsection Retrieve a key by its email address
191 If you only know the email address from your partner, you can
192 enter it instead of the key ID. It is unlikely but possible
193 that there are more keys with the same address. In this situation,
194 WinPT will warn you that multiple keys were imported. The difference
195 to the search function is, that the keys were dirctly fetched and
196 not displayed as a key result list.
197
198
199 An example:
200
201 pattern: name_of_friend@@gmx.net
202
203 [Receive]
204
205
206 @subsection Search for a key by pattern
207 If you want to communicate with a new mail partner and you are
208 not sure about the key ID, it can be useful to search for his
209 email address. This address is considered as quite unique.
210
211 An example:
212
213 pattern: winpt@@windows-privacy-tray.com
214
215 [Search]
216
217 Now a dialog is opened with a list of all keys which matched
218 the search string. If the name @strong{and} the email address
219 is known, the matching key should be selected and "Receive"
220 should be clicked. Then the key will be downloaded and added
221 to your keyring. Now you can encrypt data with this key, for
222 example an email.
223
224 @subsection Sending a Key to the Keyserver
225 After you generated a new key pair, it is a good idea to send your
226 key to the keyserver to make it available for other users. If you
227 issue a signature, the key ID is part of the signature and people can
228 automatically retrieve your key when they try to verify the signature.
229
230 Actually, the action is performed in the Key Manager and not in the
231 keyserver dialog. Just open the Key Manager, select the key you want
232 to send right-click on it and chose "Send to Keyserver" in the popup
233 menu. Then a message box with the result is shown.
234
235 @subsection Add, Delete or Edit a Keyserver Entry
236 The keyserver dialog allow to change the existing keyserver entries,
237 to delete them or to add new entries. Just right click on a selected
238 item and a popup menu will be shown with ("Edit", "Remove" and "New").
239
240 @section Using the Clipboard
241
242 A major aim from the first day was, that the program does not
243 depend on a special mailer client. For this reason it uses the
244 clipboard to encrypt and/or sign data.
245 For the examples, let's assume that you want to write a new
246 mail or that you received a mail protected by GnuPG.
247
248 @subsection Encrypt Data in the Clipboard
249 Just copy the text from the mailer window into the clipboard.
250 This is usually done by CTRL+C, make sure you really selected
251 all portions of the text. Then right-click on the tray icon
252 and select Clipboard->Encryption. Now a dialog is shown to
253 select the recipients. This means you need to select all
254 keys which should be able to decrypt the mail. Confirm with "OK".
255 GnuPG now encrypts the data with the selected recipients. At the
256 end a message box with the result is shown. Now the clipboard should
257 contain the encrypted data. Just paste it into the mailer window.
258 The output should contain a header and a footer
259 "BEGIN PGP MESSAGE" and "END PGP MESSAGE.
260
261 @subsection Decrypt/Verify Data from the Clipboard
262
263 @subsection Sign the Clipboard
264
265 @section The Key Manager
266
267 This part of the program is propably most important for many users.
268 It contains function to manage your keyring and to perform actions
269 which are required and/or useful in the OpenPGP environment.
270
271 @subsection Tips
272
273 @itemize @bullet
274
275 @item
276 If you want to import quickly a key from a into the keyring, just
277 drag and drop the file into the Key Manager window. Then the import
278 procedure will be automatically started.
279
280 @item
281 Key which were fetched from keyservers often contain a lot of,
282 maybe obsolete, self signatures, if you want to get rid of them
283 you can use the Key Edit->Clean feature. Just start the edit
284 dialog and select the clean command. That's it.
285
286 @item
287 The keyserver dialog does not allow to import a key directly
288 via an URL, as an alternative you may use the "Import HTTP..."
289 feature in the Key Manager. With it you can directly fetch keys
290 from the web (Example: http://www.users.my-isp.de/~joe/gpg-keys.asc).
291
292 @item
293 To customize the parameters of the generated key, you can use
294 the expert key generation. It allows you to set the public key
295 algorithm and/or the size of the key directly.
296
297 @item
298 Most of the list view based dialogs allow to use the right
299 mouse button, to show popup menus with available commands.
300
301 @end itemize
302
303 @subsection Create a Revocation Certificate
304
305 It is very important to do this step early as possible. With this
306 certificate, you can revoke your entire key. The reason for this
307 can be for example, that your key is no longer used or even compromised.
308 After you generated the revoc cert, you should move it to a secure place
309 because anybody who gets access to it, can render your key unuseable.
310
311 Just right-click on your key and select "Revoke Cert". If you do this
312 step directly after key generation, there is no need to change the
313 default values. Just select a file name and enter the passphrase.
314 The program issues a warning which should be read carefully.
315
316 @subsection Adding a new secondary key
317
318 For most users the existing keys in the key pair are enough
319 and no extra key is needed. But there are some exceptions.
320
321 @itemize @bullet
322
323 @item
324 The primary key has no secondary key and the primary key is not
325 able to encrypt data. In this case it can be a good idea to
326 add a secondary encryption key.
327
328 @item
329 A lot of people use secondary encryption keys with an expiration
330 date. Usually the key is valid for 1-2 years. After the key is expired,
331 a new key is needed in order to encrypt data.
332
333 @end itemize
334
335 What kind of public key algorithm should be selected is a matter
336 of taste. RSA and ElGamal are both capable for encryption. For most
337 users it's a good idea to let the program chose the key size (in bits).
338 The default settings should be secure enough for most purposes.
339
340 @subsection Adding a new user ID
341 If you got a new email account, it's propably a good idea to
342 add these new account to your key also. For example:
343
344 A new account was registed at gmail.com (john.doo@@gmail.com).
345 Then you should create a new user ID with the following fields:
346
347 name: John Doo
348
349 email: john.doo@@gmail.com
350
351 comment: (optional)
352
353 Now email programs are able to associate this address with your
354 key when somebody wants to send you a protected mail to this account.
355
356 @subsection Adding a photographic ID
357 With this function you can add a photo to your public. It will be
358 displayed in the key property dialog.
359
360 You just need to select a JPEG file which contains the photo and
361 enter your passphrase and confirm with OK. Please read the note
362 in the dialog carefully to make sure the photo has a proper size
363 (file, height and weight).
364
365 @subsection Adding a new designated revoker
366 If you want to allow another key to revoke your own key, this
367 might be useful if you lost your secret or a simliar situation,
368 you can use this function to add a designated revoker to your key.
369
370 All you need to do is to select the key you want to add as a desig
371 revoker. But please bear in mind that this procedure cannot be undone
372 and that this person really has the power to make your public key
373 unuseable. You really should trust the selected key, in case it is
374 not a key owned by yourself.
375
376 @subsection Export a Public Key
377 There are several reason why to export a public key and there
378 are also several ways to do it. If you want to send the key
379 directly to a mail recipient, you can select the key, right-click,
380 and select "Send Key to Mail Recipient". As an alternative, you
381 can also export it to the clipboard or to a file. To export a
382 key to the clipboard, you can select "Copy key to Clipboard"
383 in the popup menu of the selected key. To export it to a file,
384 you need to select the menu "Key" and then "Export...". The
385 program will automatically suggest a name for the output.
386
387 @subsection Import a Public Key
388 Similar to the key import, the import of a key can be done in
389 several ways. First, let's assume you got a mail with an OpenPGP
390 key included as inline text. Then you can use the current window
391 feature and "Decrypt/Verify" to import the key. Alternative you
392 also may use the clipboard. To achieve this, you first need to
393 select the entire key (CTRL+A) and then copy it to the clipboard
394 (CTRL+C), then use the Key Manager (Edit->Paste) to import it.
395 If the key is stored as an attachment, or you want to import
396 a key from a file in general, just drag the file and drop it
397 into the Key Manager window or use "Key" -> "Import...".
398
399 @bye

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