Project EVA was started by Seth Goldstein, a professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. Project EVA seeks to increase the awareness of available technologies for signing, verifying and authenticating emails, based on public key cryptography. The goal is to promote the widespread use of public key cryptography systems, such as PGP, in an effort to reduce or eliminate spam mail recieved by users. This site focuses mainly on PGP technology (see note below), and provides information on how to obtain, install and use PGP email signing, as well as links to information about PGP alternatives. We hope you find this site informative and helpful. People say they have problems with unsolicited email -- spam. We believe that the problem is not with the messages being unsolicited, but that they are unauthenticated. Every day there are plenty of people we have never met that we would be happy to receive a message from. Unfortunately, every day there are even more messages that come from people unwilling to say who they are, but who are happy to advertise to you. Or pass on the latest email worm. Because of this flood, numerous impressive techniques have been developed. Servers and mail programs now learn to recognize spam! But commercial mail continues, and adapts, and the filters have to constantly keep up. What we really need is to be able to selectively allow who may or may not reach us by email. The existing "envelopes" of email -- "From" and such -- were not designed to be tamperproof. Anyone sufficiently interested may send mail as if they were you. Public Key Cryptography offers a way to show that you, and only you, wrote a particular message. We think everyone should do so. This project is a way of encouraging and instructing you how to send authenticated email. PGP (short for Pretty Good Privacy) is a public key encryption program originally written by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. Over the past few years, PGP has attracted thousands of adherent supporters all over the globe and has become a de-facto standard for encryption of email on the Internet. Project EVA - 2004