OK, frost is employing a web of trust concept in an attempt to limit
the effects spamming can have on frost's usability. I have touched
on some of those concepts in various places in this manual. This
will hopefully tie together some of the concepts for you.
In the above picture, the last message
in the board frost-announce has been selected. All the messages
posted to this board have been signed by some person who has the boards
private key. This is indicated in the Sig column of the message
header list. The 'CHECK' there is an indicator that the message
has been signed. Had the message not been signed, the word 'NONE'
would appear in that column. The green check mark and red 'X'
icons are for you to use to indicate you trust or do not trust the
signer of that message and all other messages signed by that signer.
If you press the check mark icon, the Sig column will change from
'CHECK' to 'GOOD' for the messages from that message signer. Once
you have accepted that signer into your "Web of Trust" you can then send
encrypted messages based upon that signer's identity key.
This can be done in at least two
different ways. One is that you also have the private key to the
same board as the person who has signed the message and just send a
message to that individual via the same board from which you read their
message. This is not necessary though. You can create your
own secured board and just provide that person the public key to your
board. Then as long as you have accepted that person in your web
of trust (by having clicked on the green check mark icon when you
selected a message from them) you can send them a message on your board
that will be encrypted to their identity key and which only they can
then decipher.
OK, back to the situation where we are
sending a message. This time we have chosen to sign and encrypt
our message . There is an attached file also (indicated by the
<attach> tags in the message window; normally within these attach
tags the full path to your file is listed, but the path is stripped off
before sending the file to of course maintain your anonymity). To
preserve my anonymity I have blanked out the From portion of this
message and who it is encrypted for. However, when I send this
message, anyone else reading the message will only see scrambled text.
They will not know what the message says, or even that it
is informing the recipient of the message that a file is attached.
This is a means to further secure and privatize both the messages
and files that you are sharing/sending/receiving in frost. Note:
You cannot use the same methods to encrypt files that you find in
the Search tab in frost.
Above is an example of what a user
would see if they were reading a message not encrypted to their
identity. The selected message also includes information that an
attached file has also been uploaded for the intended recipient.
However this is not at all evident from the encrypted message
text. (It's just that I created this encrypted message, that
is the only way I know there is also information regarding an
attached file.) The encryption employs 1024bit RSA. More
information about this encryption method can be found here.