What is PGP?
PGP is a program that gives your electronic mail something that it otherwise doesn’t have: Privacy. It does this by encrypting your mail so that nobody but the intended person can read it. When encrypted, the message looks like a meaningless jumble of random characters. PGP has proven itself quite capable of resisting even the most sophisticated forms of analysis aimed at reading the encrypted text. PGP can also be used to apply a digital signature to a message without encrypting it. This is normally used in public postings where you don’t want to hide what you are saying, but rather want to allow others to verify that the message actually came from you. Once a digital signature is created, it is impossible for anyone to modify either the message or the signature without the modification being detected by PGP. While PGP seems (and according to many of its users is) easy to use, it does give you enough rope so that you can hang yourself.
This FAQ answer is excerpted from PGP(tm) User’s Guide; Volume I: Essential Topics by Philip Zimmermann PGP(tm) uses public-key encryption to protect E-mail and data files. Communicate securely with people you’ve never met, with no secure channels needed for prior exchange of keys. PGP is well featured and fast, with sophisticated key management, digital signatures, data compression, and good ergonomic design. Pretty Good(tm) Privacy (PGP), from Phil’s Pretty Good Software, is a high security cryptographic software application for MS-DOS, Unix, VAX/VMS, and other computers. PGP allows people to exchange files or messages with privacy, authentication, and convenience. Privacy means that only those intended to receive a message can read it. Authentication means that messages that appear to be from a particular person can only have originated from that person.
PGP (Pretty good Privacy) is the most widely recognized public key encryption program in the world. It can be used to protect the privacy of email, data files, drives and instant messaging. Traffic on the Internet is susceptible to snooping by third parties with a modicum of skill. Data packets can be captured and stored for years. Even mail servers will often indefinitely store messages, which can be read now or at a future point, sometimes long after the author has changed his or her point of view. Email, unlike a phone call or letter, is not legally protected as private communication, and can therefore be read by third parties, legal or otherwise, without permission or knowledge of the author. Many privacy watchdog groups advocate, if you aren’t using encryption, don’t include anything in an email you wouldn’t want to see published. Ideally this includes personal information as well, such as name, address, phone number, passwords, and so on. PGP encryption provides privacy missing f
PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, a software program that encrypts and decrypts data. PGP is currently a global standard for encrypting email and financial transactions. PGP allows users to digitally “sign” a document or message to prove authorship. A robust version of PGP, called PGP Personal Privacy 6.5.3., is available at www.macafee.com. It enables you to encrypt not only email but also to encrypt data on your hard drive, and also includes digital signature capabilities from Entrust, NetTools PKI and VeriSign. Pay attention to the name PGP acknowledges that no privacy software is perfect, and you should always be careful when sending and receiving information on the Internet.
This FAQ answer is excerpted from PGP(tm) User’s Guide; Volume I: Essential Topics by Philip Zimmermann PGP(tm) uses public-key encryption to protect E-mail and data files. Communicate securely with people you’ve never met, with no secure channels needed for prior exchange of keys. PGP is well featured and fast, with sophisticated key management, digital signatures, data compression, and good ergonomic design.
