This article embarks on an exploration of LUKS and eCryptfs, shedding light on their mechanisms, benefits, and practical applications.

This article delves into the world of GPG, guiding you through the process of encrypting and securely transferring files.

If you have sent any plaintext confidential emails to someone (most likely you did), have you ever questioned yourself about the mail being tampered with or read by anyone during transit? If not, you should! Any unencrypted email is like a postcard. It can be seen by anyone (crackers/security hackers, corporations, governments, or anyone with the required skills), during its transit.

An introduction to PKI, TLS and X.509, from the ground up. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) provides a framework of encryption and data communications standards used to secure communications over public networks. At the heart of PKI is a trust built among clients, servers and certificate authorities (CAs). This trust is established and propagated through the generation, exchange and verification of certificates.

If you use GPG keys, learn about the benefits to storing them on a smart card.

Eric Biggers and Paul Crowley were unhappy with the disk encryption options available for Android on low-end phones and watches. For them, it was an ethical issue. Eric said:

Learn why at rest encryption doesn't mean encryption when your laptop is asleep. There are many steps you can take to harden a computer, and a common recommendation you'll see in hardening guides is to enable disk encryption. Disk encryption also often is referred to as "at rest encryption", especially in security compliance guides, and many compliance regimes, such as PCI, mandate the use of at rest encryption. This term refers to the fact that data is encrypted "at rest" or when the disk is unmounted and not in use. At rest encryption can be an important part of system-hardening, yet many administrators who enable it, whether on workstations or servers, may end up with a false sense of security if they don't understand not only what disk encryption protects you from, but also, and more important, what it doesn't.

I have been focusing a lot on security and privacy issues in this year's columns so far, but I realize some of you may expect a different kind of topic from me (or maybe are just tired of all this security talk). Well, you are in luck.

In my first two columns in this series, I gave an overview of Tails, including how to get the distribution securely, and once you have it, how to use some of the basic tools.