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PGP is a method of encrypting email transmissions so as to make them indecipherable by third parties. There are some risks in transmitting information such as credit card numbers via email, and the use of PGP makes them close to negligible. PGP is available as shareware for most computers, large and small.
The Short Course
Here's how to get PGP. (PGP is powerful enough to have export restrictions placed on it. If you live outside the United States, you can obtain PGP legally, but it's a little trickier.)
- Get the software.
- Install it on your computer.
- Read The Fine Manual (important!)
- Get the bookstore's public key and add it to your public keyring.
- Compose your email message in your email program.
- Encrypt it with the Bookstore's public key.
- Send it to the Bookstore at books@uci.edu
If you'd like to learn more about PGP, try Arne Helm's very good HTMLized PGP user's guide. If you are familiar with PGP, the UCI Bookstore has its own public key with which you can encrypt orders. It has been signed and certified by the Webmaster here, and certified out of band by by BETSI at Bellcore, and by SLED. You can access the public keys for BETSI at Bellcore and for SLED.
The UCI Bookstore's public key is available in a variety of different ways:
If you're one of our most suspicious customers, you can call our PGP Fingerprint Hotline at (714) 824-3076. We'll read you out our fingerprint, and you can see whether it matches the one on the key you received.
- Here, on this server.
- By fingering the Bookstore's order desk, books@uci.edu, at its fully qualified domain name books@orion.oac.uci.edu. If you'd like, you can finger the order desk via the IU finger gateway, but be sure to use the BACK button on your browser to return here afterwards. (The fact that it's IU's rather than our local script should placate the more suspicious.)
- By sending an email message to key@four11.com, the PGP keyserver at SLED (Stable Large Email Database) with books@uci.edu in the body of the message. You can also use SLED to search for the Bookstore's listing and obtain the key from their Web server.
At present, we're using PGP to receive orders only; when we enter into the Web of Trust more fully in future, we want to have the time and personnel to do it right.
PGP is just one of the things we hope will make the UCI Bookstore a better place to shop. We have the capability to autoencrypt forms right now; once non-proprietary standards for secure HTTP exist, forms-based transactions will be secure automagically, without your having to do a thing.
