Pretty Good Privacy

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting electronic mails (e-mails) to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was originally created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991.

PGP and other similar products follow the OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880) for encrypting and decrypting data.

OpenPGP

OpenPGP is on the Internet Standards Track; the current specification is RFC 4880 (November 2007). OpenPGP is still under development and the successor to RFC 2440, which is RFC 4880, has been made a proposed standard. Many e-mail clients provide OpenPGP-compliant email security as described in RFC 3156.

The Free Software Foundation has developed its own OpenPGP-compliant program called GNU Privacy Guard (abbreviated GnuPG or GPG). GnuPG is freely available together with all source code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is maintained separately faraway from several Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) that interact with the GnuPG library for encryption, decryption and signing functions (see KGPG, Seahorse, MacGPG). Several other vendors have also developed OpenPGP-compliant software.

Pretty Good Privacy Media

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  How PGP encryption works visually

Related pages

• FreeOTFE - Disk encryption
• PuTTY - SSH encryption

Further reading

• Garfinkel, Simson (1991-12-01). PGP: Pretty Good Privacy. O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN 1-56592-098-8.
• Zimmerman, Phil (June 1991). "Why I Wrote PGP" (1999 ed.). Retrieved 2008-03-03.

OpenPGP implementations

• PGP Corporation Archived 2004-12-30 at the Wayback Machine
• GNU Privacy Guard
• cGeep Pro
• OpenPGP::SDK Archived 2012-12-25 at Archive.today
• Authora Inc.
• McAfee Inc.
• Feneris Solutions Inc. Canada
• EasyByte Cryptocx - Component
• Veridis Archived 2004-12-17 at the Wayback Machine
• Legion of The Bouncy Castle
• BSD Privacy Guard
• Prime Factors Inc. Archived 2009-02-20 at the Wayback Machine
• Oxford Brookes Secure Email Proxy Archived 2009-02-21 at the Wayback Machine

Support

• PGP Corporation Support Forum Archived 2008-10-19 at the Wayback Machine community support plus contributions from PGP Support staff
• Phil Zimmermann's Home Page
• MIT Public Key Directory for Registration and Search
• List of public keyservers
• IETF OpenPGP working group
• OpenPGP Alliance