inportb

Maintaining a trustable Online presence is important. While signing all your messages using RSA is a good way to assure others that these messages come from the same source, it could still be difficult to convince people that you are who you say you are.

Certificate authorities (CA’s) are trusted organizations that link digital signatures to physical entities. After you register with a certificate authority, your identity could be verified. Of course, you’d need to pay the CA so that it could run all sorts of background checks on you. The last time I checked, it costed a couple of hundred dollars a year for a certificate from companies like VeriSign and Thawte. Since I’m developing a free application, this is a cost that I’m not willing to pay.

Thawte has an alternative program, Thawte Freemail, that distributes free certificates with which you can verify your digital signatures. As the name implies, it’s designed to be used for securing emails. Really, though, these certificates can be used for anything else. Richard Dallaway outlines his process for obtaining and using a Thawte Freemail certificate.

Well what do you know? I can start signing Imagine soon, and y’all can rest assured that you’re getting a quality app from a trusted source. (Well, maybe I’ll hold off on that for a bit; I want it to be able to run without special privileges.)