Free Personal Email Certificates
At last, one of the Certificate Authorities has come to the conclusion that the average Internet user is not going to spend anywhere from $50 to $100 per year to prove their identity online or sign and encrypt their email. Thawte, one of the more forward thinking CA’s, is now offering a free Personal Email Certificate that allows you to prove your identity, and sign emails – allowing you to prove that an email did in fact come from your computer and your email account (no more Joe Jobs here).
The consumer encryption problem is really a chicken and egg issue. On one side you the software developers that would rather not put the time and effort into making online identity and non-repudiation of transactions a standard feature in all Internet applications. On the other, you have the consumers, in desperate need of a standard – USABLE method for proving their identity online (or say, checking the identity of their eBay trading partner).
On the software side, the developers seem to be waiting for a critical mass of consumers to adopt a specific solution (which will never happen). On the consumer side, they continue to look for a solution that doesn’t require an engineering degree to install and a PHD to use.
Making the consumer credential free, drives the software industry in a direction . . . one, arguably, that I did not believe would be successful in the past (I have always thought that PKI for the masses will never fly duue to its complexity). While the consumer experience leaves a lot to be desired, its a great first step in the process of deploying some sort of digital credential to each Internet user.
Ok software developers, let’s start focusing on a usable consumer interface for this foundation that Thawte has deployed.
Also of note, Thawte does not seem to have a eassy way for you to integrate their certificates into the Apple OSX Mail.app. I have written a ‘quick’ rundown of the (35) steps that you will need to complete to make this work on a Mac. This process takes about 15 minutes.
Have fun, and happy signing!
April 16th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Seems a little complicated for something already done so well on joar.com.
http://www.joar.com/certificates/
April 16th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
That does look a lot easier . . . wish I had found this before spending 2 hours figuring out how to do it . . . guess Google failed me this time.
Just have to chock it up to a learning opportunity!
July 14th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
You really might want to fix your tutorial – I followed it step by step before I realized it was wildly overcomplicated!
July 14th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Feel free to suggest any areas that could be cut down!
I tried the process over at joar.com (see comments) and was not able to get it to work.
Unfortunatly, it seems that there is no easy way to get these to work on the Mac as of right now.
December 6th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I’ve been following the instructions (which are good. I had no clue from the dialog boxes from thawte.)
However when I do steps 14-18 “request a certificate from a CA” it says it will send me email, but I never get anything. I’ve tried yahoo mail and gmail.
Any idea what’s going on?