PGP Key Information

OakWood have chosen to use PGP for signing and encryption of email messages. PGP is available in a personal edition free and provides strong 128-bit encryption even in the international version. PGP includes plug-ins for use with Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora. You can find out about PGP from http://www.pgp.com/ and download the freeware international version from http://www.pgpi.org/.

Obtaining OakWood's public key
OakWood's PGP public key id is 0xAED8D6B0. You can obtain the key from public key servers including http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371 and http://www.pgp.uk.demon.net:11371, by mail autoresponder, by fingering pgp-keys@oak-wood.co.uk or from this link:

PGP Key for Chris Hastie, Oakwood Arboricultural Consultancy

Validating the key
None of these means of obtaining our key is secure and the key should be validated before use. A PGP key is considered valid if it is signed by someone in whom you have placed trust.

You implicitly trust yourself, so if you are satisfied that the key you have is the correct one you can sign it yourself to validate it.

Alternatively, you may rely on a trusted third party. OakWood's key is signed by two trusted Certification Authorities, Thawte and TC TrustCenter.

The identity of the key owners have been verified by Thawte, a major Certification Authority. You should obtain copies of the following Thawte keys and mark them as trusted:

Thawte's keys are available by secure connection to https://www.thawte.com/cgi/lifecycle/roots.exe or from public keyservers. Additionally, most modern browsers are shipped with them embedded and you can export them from Internet Explorer as a Base 64 Encoded X.509 certificate, open the file in a text editor, copy the contents and then paste it into PGP Keys.

The key is also signed by TC TrustCenter, a major German CA. You should obtain copies of the following keys and mark them as trusted:

TC TrustCenter keys are available by secure connection to https://www.trustcenter.de/certservices/cacerts/en/en.htm or from public keyservers.