Secure email and LibreOffice documents
On the Safe Side
Using personal, self-signed certificates and digital encryption.
Aside from GnuPG, which is well known among Linux users for general file and email encryption and signatures, support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is built in to many free and proprietary products, such as web browsers, email programs, and office suites. SSL is used not only for encrypting access to online services, but for encryption and digital signatures of documents. In this article, I’ll show an easy way to create and use a personal, self-signed certificate for use in Firefox (Iceweasel in Debian), Thunderbird (Icedove in Debian), and Libre/ OpenOffice.