From the Canyon Edge: Gmail and GPG in Chromium, with cr-gpg!

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Gmail and GPG in Chromium, with cr-gpg!

Once upon a time, I used FireGPG to sign, encrypt, decrypt, and check GPG and PGP messages in Gmail. Sadly, FireGPG eventually withered away, dropping support for Gmail altogether. Encrypted, authenticated email messaging is very important to me in some specific situations, and for those, I've been using Gmail, but then copying and pasting the data manually back and forth to a command line, and using GPG by hand.

However, I have been extremely excited to see the cr-gpg plugin for Chromium coming along very rapidly, and finally re-enabling email encryption for Gmail! The plugin is still in an Alpha state, but I've reported a few bugs here, and worked with the developers and helped test others.

I'm pleased to say that I'm now using cr-gpg on a daily basis for encryption/decryption with:

Signature verification is still a little broken in a couple of scenarios, but I've reported these bugs upstream and they're actively being worked.

Here's a couple of screen shots of it in action, first decrypting a message, then encrypting one.