PGP Encrypted Emails

naia · Jul 7, 2015

With services like Facebook now offering the feature to display your public PGP key on your profile, and to have all emails sent to you by Facebook encrypted with this key (source), and with Xenforo being a forum built on security, and especially with the recent addition of two factor authentication, it seems that this would logically be the next step for improving security.

This feature would mainly serve to protect staff information (such as private messages sent to them, and password reset requests) by not sending them via email in plain-text. This would also be nice for the occasional paranoid user (ex. me).

melbo · Jul 14, 2015

I would love to offer this and make the implementation as easy as Facebook's

beanfan78 · Jan 23, 2016

One of my forum members were asking about this. I honestly had no idea what it was so I started reading up about it. My domain is secure with SSL, but that doesn't seem like a lot. Does anyone use PGP with their Xenforo? I would like to offer my members the most secure platform that I can.

melbo · Jan 23, 2016

It's not really something that's available as an integrated feature of XF but I'd love to see it.

beanfan78 · Jan 24, 2016

melbo said:
It's not really something that's available as an integrated feature of XF but I'd love to see it.

Thanks for the response. I am not really familiar with the technology of PGP. Perhaps I am missing another layer of how I can secure xenforo? I mean without taking it to the world of TOR

melbo · Jan 24, 2016

Oh, PGP/GPG just encrypts messages between 2 (or more) parties using 2 'keys'. The only thing it would really do for XF (and what we're asking for here) would be to allow a member to add their public key to their account settings and then all email traffic from the forum to that user would be encrypted even further than your SSL/TLS. Anyone can use PGP in a forum post or conversation now since the encryption is performed on the users PC and decryption occurs on the other users PC.

The messages after encryption look like this:

Code:

melbo · Jan 24, 2016

This seems like a project that @Liam W could easily create. I know he is an expert in public/private key pairs as a Bitcoiner

naia · Jan 25, 2016

@Liam W How about a quote on this?

Liam W · Jan 25, 2016

I actually looked into it when I got @melbo's mention, but I can't find a working PHP PGP library...

The extension isn't working for me (and hasn't been updated in ages so isn't a surprise really).

Liam

melbo · Jan 26, 2016

@Liam W
Maybe try searching for GPG or GnuPG. PGP is actually now owned by Symantec. GPG is an open source version (fully compatible) maintained by Gnu. There may also be OpenPGP, not sure since I just use GPG as packaged in Fedora.

http://php.net/manual/en/book.gnupg.php
https://pecl.php.net/package/gnupg
https://github.com/jasonhinkle/php-gpg

PGP Encrypted Emails

naia

Well-known member

melbo

Well-known member

beanfan78

Active member

melbo

Well-known member

beanfan78

Active member

melbo

Well-known member

melbo

Well-known member

naia

Well-known member

Liam W

in memoriam 1998-2020

melbo

Well-known member

Similar threads

We value your privacy