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Cryptography and Security Events in Kitchener-Waterloo
Posted by Bob Jonkman on October 9th, 2013
The months of October and November are shaping up to have some great lectures and presentations on cryptography, security and privacy.
Keysigning materials
Yesterday started off with an informal keysigning at the KWLUG meeting. The presentation was on the Scratch programming environment, nothing to do with GnuPG/PGP or cryptography. But a few of us exchanged little slips of paper with our key fingerprints, verified that the name with the fingerprint matched the person we knew, signed the keys, and so improved our standing in the Web of Trust. I hope that this becomes a regular part of all KWLUG meetings. The more people that participate, the more confident we can be about the validity of keys we may not have verified ourselves.
Today I attended the first UofW CSClub lecture on Security and Privacy by Sarah Harvey. If you’ve been following the news about the Snowden revelations you’ll know why security and privacy is important. The room was full of computer science, math and cryptography students, so the discussions were deep and technical.
Sarah Harvey shows a slide of Edward Snowden
There was a vacancy in the November KWLUG meeting so I asked Sarah if she would repeat her lecture. Let’s see what the KWLUG bosses have to say…
There are more CSClub lectures scheduled, check the schedule on the CSClub site.
KWCrypto logo, the M-209 cipher machine
I’ve volunteered to do a presentation on Encrypting E-mail with GnuPG, Thunderbird and Enigmail, followed by a formal keysigning. I’m developing the presentation notes and keysigning procedure on the KWCrypto Interest Group Wiki that was set up after the Kwartzlab keysigning party last year. Please join me on the Wiki and the mailing list — I’d appreciate the help.
–Bob.
Keysigning Materials picture taken by Bob Jonkman and released under a 
Creative Commons — Attribution — CC BY license.
M-209 cipher machine by Greg Goebel used under 
Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic – CC BY-SA 2.0
Picture of Sarah Harvey taken by Laurel L. Russwurm and used under a Creative Commons — Attribution — CC BY license.