Verifying the SNEWS alert signature

To help prevent hoaxes, any supernova alert from SNEWS will be digitally signed using this public key. The key's ID is 68DF93F7, and its fingerprint is 0D2C 7BC4 0032 E26D 19CE 6B1A E00D AA34 68DF 93F7

Make sure that your email client can happily verify a signed email now, before the time when you really want to be outside looking up instead of configuring a computer program. Here is an email message you could test your system on. Below are links to instructions for setting up many common email clients. If you know of more clients and methods we should link to, please let me know.

Note that this is an "old-style" or "inline" signature, rather than a newer "detached" signature built as a MIME message. This is because we've not been able to kludge together a way for our scripts to send a properly formed detached signature email. However, it does have the advantage that you could always save the email to a file and verify the signature outside your mail client, something which is harder to do with new-style messages.

Also, if you are able to verify the SNEWS key with a SNEWS working group member and are satisfied that it is legitimate, please sign the key yourself and submit your signatures back to the keyservers, so that the world's "web of trust" for this key will grow.

Easy extension for Chrome and Firefox:

Mailvelope is a very basic, easy to use extension/addon for Chrome/Firefox, all you need to do is simply download it and enable it on your browser. Once that is done you are free to wait for the SNEWS alert. The program should auto-look up and confirm the signature when it is recieved, however if you want to be absolutely sure you can add the SNEWS Public Key to your keyring and add any tags or names you want to it so you know that it is from us.

PGP and/or GnuPG setup on your email client: