[wplug] Meeting presentation idea: Public Key Encryption

[Brandon Kuczenski]

I was looking over the lists of meeting topics that we've had at WPLUG in 
the last few years, and I've been grappling with all sorts of encryption 
and authentication problems, and I was thinking, how about a talk by 
somebody who knows how the Public Key infrastructure is supposed to work, 
from the perspective of the small-time system administrator, particularly 
x509 stuff?  Things like how to create and sign a self-signed certificate 
for secure email and web serving, and how to distribute the certificate 
authority file to users so that everybody involved can trust everybody? 
The talk could also clarify the differences between a certificate signed 
by, say, Verisign, and a homebrew one.

A future talk, or the same talk, could then talk about how to encrypt 
email using PGP keys... what with WiFi becoming ever present (and wiretaps 
becoming ever easier to get).

I haven't found a good encompassing treatment of this, and I still don't 
understand it; otherwise, I'd offer to give the talk.

Does this seem interesting?

-Brandon