PGP: A Simple Guide to Pretty Good Privacy Setup

David Endler

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The last decade has seen an explosion of people joining the online community, unfortunately, not all of them have the best of intentions. The information highway is evolving rapidly and online privacy is beginning to take a pivotal role in its development. Today, an Internet user's privacy is vulnerable to a plethora of online attacks, so that sending messages with guaranteed secrecy has never before been such a hotly pursued goal. During the past few years, the freeware program PGP has become the de facto standard for encryption of email over the Internet. This article, the first of a two-part series, examines issues involved in the initial setup of PGP.

"What is PGP?" (Pretty Good Privacy)

PGP is a program that allows regular users to provide a high level of confidentiality in their email. It is somewhat controversial because it is capable of "military grade" cryptography, which means it can seriously thwart efforts by some government agencies to decrypt the mail for their own uses. Whether this is still true remains unknown to the public. Obviously the U.S. government did not like Phil Zimmermann's releasing strong cryptography to the world and tried unsuccessfully to prosecute him.

Currently, PGP is throughout the Internet community for several main reasons. For beginners, the three main functions of PGP to focus on are:

1. Encryption of a message so that only the intended receiver can decrypt the message. This is the most common use with email communication.<>