The Keygloo Number

Traditional Public key infrastructures make use of digital certificates to identify a person and bind him to a public key. A digital certificate, in addition to containing the user’s public key contains other identifying details such as Name, Subject, Age, Address, Dog’s name (I am exaggerating here ofcourse, but you get the drift).

Then it contains details such as certificate version number, serial number, validity period, purpose, Certification authority’s name, Hash algorithm, and a few more. That’s quite a handful of details and Certification Authorities charge anywhere to the tune of 100$ for personal certificates running to thousands of dollars for server certificates.

And if such heavy financial overheads seem trivial, be it assured that the efforts required to understand the usage of digital certificates, the bulky software required to manage a digital certificate system, and the resources that you may have to feed for any such software are definitely nontrivial.

And if such heavy financial overheads seem trivial, be it assured that the efforts required to understand the usage of digital certificates, the bulky software required to manage a digital certificate system, and the resources that you may have to feed for any such software are definitely nontrivial. Even software that don’t make use of digital certificates carry significant complexity when it comes to public key transfers between communicating persons and demand heavy resources.

This is where keygloo differs from traditional public key based encryption software. Keygloo represents the public key by a 10-digit unique number. This number is easy to remember. Alternately it can be stored in the Keygloo address book along with the email id of the owner of the Keygloo number. To send an encrypted email, it is enough for a person to mention the Keygloo number of the recipient. Keygloo takes care of transparently obtaining the public key associated with the number from the Keygloo public key distribution server and encrypting the email message using this key.

The Keygloo number can easily be communicated to other people by word of mouth, over the telephone or through business cards. There is no software operation involved in transfer of public keys between communicating entities.

The above merits make the application light, easy to use and less expensive (It’s actually free).