WEB OF TRUST


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.  

Trust Message

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.  

File Attach

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.  

Encrypted Message

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.

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