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Homework 1

The deadline for this homework assignment is Wednesday, January 26, 2011, at noon. You must use the BOSS system for the submission.

Note: read and understand the submission instructions carefully! Failing to comply with the instructions will prevent the grading software to process your assignment.

Part 1

Generate a pair of GnuPG public/private keys (if you don't have one already) for yourself. Optionally, you can add your photo to the key. The photo must be 128x128 and in black and white (again, adding your photo is optional and can be skipped without any penalty).

Have three people in the class sign your key (read the gpg manual to find out how this is done).

Publish the public key (in ASCII armor format) on a publicly available web page. For example, you could upload it to your web space on the School's web server or to one of the PGP key servers, such as http://pgp.mit.edu. In any case, it must be possible to download the key using a command line tool, such as wget or curl, and to import it into gpg's keyring by running gpg --import.

Create a file that contains your username as recorded in the gpg key, followed by a new line, followed by your student ID, followed by a new line, followed by the URL pointing to the page with your public key, followed by a new line, followed by a hacker nickname of your choice. Your hacker nickname must contain only alphanumeric characters, start with a letter, and be at most 16 characters long. You will use this nickname as your identifier in some of the following assignments, so choose carefully (but be creative...)

Make a cleartext signature of the file using your secret key. The resulting file should be similar to this example. Then, encrypt the file with the module's public key (the output must be in ASCII armor format). Submit this final file through the BOSS system.

Part 2

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