GeistHaus
log in · sign up

A brief introduction to GPG

loganmarchione.com

Introduction Put on your tinfoil hats, boys and girls! Today, we’re talking about security, encryption, and GPG! PGP vs OpenPGP vs GPG PGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) was a program created to encrypt/decrypt data in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann. Zimmermann formed PGP Incorporated, which was acquired serveral times and is now owned by Symantec. Fun fact - in 1993 the US government charged Zimmerman with “munitions export without a license”. At the time, cryptography systems with keys over 40 bits were considered a weapon, and since PGP used 128 bit keys, Zimmerman was in violation of the law. However, Zimmerman was able to circumvent this by publishing the entire source code of PGP in a physical book (that could be scanned with OCR and recompiled into source code), since the export of books was protected by the First Amendment. Today, PGP is no longer considered a weapon, but still cannot be exported to a specific list of individuals/countries.

0 pages link to this URL

No pages have linked to this URL yet.