Freenigma offers a free firefox extension that adds cryptography functionality to Yahoo, Gmail and MSN. The team says it is working on adding other emails services, as of now, only the three services mentioned are supported. You have to signup at their website to recieve an invitation before you will be able to download the extension. They state that it could take a few hours the most before you recieve the invitation. Mine arrived about ten minutes after I completed it.
The second email they send you contains a link to their website where you have to enter a password, pass a captcha and accept the terms of use. The password will be used to decrypt and encrypt mail, make sure you remember it. Finally, they give you the link to install the extension. You might need to add them to the allowed sites first before you can install the extension.
I restarted Firefox and was prompted to enter my mail that I registered with after the restart was completed. When I opened Gmail and started to write a new message I realised that they added a freeenigma button to gmail. This means I’am able to encrypt the mail with the click of a button right from gmail.
Unfortunatly though the recipient of the mail has to have the freenigma extension installed as well plus he needs to have been invited from your freenigma account before he will be able to do so. It is based on public and private keys. Your public key is freely available of course and can be used to encrypt a message for you. You are the only one who is able to decrypt the message using your private key. As you can see, it is impossible to send someone an encrypted message without knowing his public key, invitation takes care of that.
This is a great add on if you are working from one or two computers all the time that have firefox installed. It is however problematic if you are using gmail, yahoo mail or msn on other computers as well, for instance from public places. There is no way you will be able to install firefox or an extension on public computers which means you will not be able to read the mail your friends sent you.
Freeenigma is not working with attachements as well. The reason why it is not supported is mentioned in their faq:
“Because we would have to first send the file to our server in order to encrypt it. And from a security perspective, that isn’t a clean solution. And we would then have to scan for viruses on our freenigma server because otherwise freenigma might encrypt infected files that could then only be scanned after the recipient has decrypted the file. Thus any virus scanners on the mail server or on the recipient’s mail client would be bypassed. We’re considering a solution. Until we have implemented it, we might temporarily create a file encryption upload on the freenigma server – if there are many requests for this. Of course we also would like to support the upcoming Google File-Manager.”
The freenigma developers are working hard to improve the extension and service and I’d say you could give it a shot now or wait until the services becomes more practicable for you.
And there is the question if you really need such a service instead of using something like enigmail which keeps a third party like freenigma away from your computer.
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That’s a really good point about not being able to install an extension on a public computer. I still think it is worth a look – particularly if you do not have serious encryption requirements.