PGP Public Key and Information
Click here for my public key, for use with PGP 5.0 and newer (Diffie-Hellman algorithm). It was last updated Thursday, 10 September 2009 07:12:26 EDT.
What the heck is PGP?
PGP is Pretty
Good Privacy, a public-key cryptosystem of impressive power. In addition to
message and file encryption, PGP allows one to use digital signatures to check
the authenticity of files and e-mail messages.
A public key cryptosystem differs from traditional encryption schemes because half of a matched key pair is actually made public — anyone can encrypt a message to the creator of that key. The other half of this mathematically interrelated key, which the owner keeps secret, is used to decrypt a message created with the public part of the key. (My public key is listed above.)
The details of this process are a bit more complicated (and the mathematical explanation is downright messy). Luckily, several people have written much more complete explanations of how PGP works. The user's guide that comes with PGP 5.0 and greater also does a decent job of explaining this process.
PGP Resources
- PGP Corporation is the current owner of PGP. They maintain a suite of products aimed toward corporate users, including PGP Desktop Trial (formerly known as PGP Freeware). Due to current licensing costs and policies, I can no longer recommend the commercial product for individual users.
- Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is the successor to PGP. It's free, runs on a number of platforms, and every last byte of source code can be examined by anyone without restriction. Assuming you're comfortable with a command-line tool, this is the product I now recommend first.
- O'Reilly & Associates publishes a book, PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, which covers PGP 2.6.2, the last completely non-commercial version. While it's quite dated in describing the software itself, it's still an excellent read. Written by Simson Garfinkel, the book also includes a lot of material about the history of cryptography, the legal issues around PGP, how many of PGP's algorithmic patents were created, and a lot of the dirty details about how it works. Garfinkel is a technology columnist who has also authored several books, most of them from O'Reilly.
- Of course, Yahoo! has a PGP index with lots of cross-references.
- The International PGP Home Page includes an extensive list of links on the web.