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[change | change source]

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.