Patrick K. Kroupa has been playing with computers roughly since birth. During the 1980's he was a founding member of the Legion of Doom -- arguably the single best-known group of hackers that ever existed. Having grown bored of accessing systems that didn't belong to him, in 1991 he co-founded MindVox -- the first Internet Service Provider in New York, the third in the entire world -- one of the first 100 dot coms ever registered. He has appeared in over 15 books, 100 magazine and newspaper articles, and about a dozen special reports for television.
At present, Patrick works for the Department of Neurology at the University of Miami, where he is head of IT at the world's largest brain endowment bank.

Subject

Encryption Tools and Strategies on *nix-based Systems

The lecture will cover a range of solutions to securing and encrypting data on Unix based operating systems; primarily focusing on Linux and Solaris. Windoze XP will also be covered because -- unfortunately -- it's omnipresent and there are many people who have no choice but to make use of it.

Installing GPG and generating personal key pairs, encrypting and decrypting files, signing messages, and integrating encryption into commonly used applications such as Mozilla, mutt and Pine will also be covered.

This part of the presentation will conclude with an overview of the most useful GUI front-ends that are available for GPG, under GNOME and KDE. As well as the inclusion of Windoze-oriented GPG extensions for email clients such as Outlook and Eudora.

The second part of the lecture will cover the advantages of using cryptographic file systems such as CFS and TCFS on a larger-scale, where transparent access, granularity and group file sharing are a priority.

Matt Blaze's Cryptographic File System (CFS) -- which is probably the world's most popular and widely used, secure filesystem will be covered and compared to the Transparent Cryptographic File System (TCFS).

The basic system architecture of both CFS and TCFS will be covered; key management, setting up a server and what can be expected in terms of performance will conclude the presentation.