Pretty Good Privacy: Safe And Reliable Encryption
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption computer program that provides safe communication and data exchange online. Pretty Good Privacy allows cryptographic privacy and data authentication and is used for signing, encrypting/decrypting texts, e-mails, files. With Pretty Good Privacy e-mail communication becomes more secure.
We all know that Internet is a decentralized structure and there are parties that want to get your personal data (including messaging) with not very good intentions. In order to protect communications, PGP uses a set of three keys for messages encryption and decryption. Open key gives the possibility to encrypt messages the way they can be read using special code. Individual key is used for decryption. Session key is chosen from the open key base and is used for each new session. Open key can be used free. There exist many sets of such keys. Individual key must be stored in a protected (with a password) space. In this case, even if your message is caught it still cannot be read or decrypted.
Online encryption is a process of text conversion into secret code that can be read only using the “special key’. Other parties will see the message as an incomprehensible symbols set. The more difficult the encryption is, the stronger is the protection.
Pretty Good Privacy allows:
- Send files and messages with a high level of security
- Generate public keys for messages encryption
- Generate private keys for messages decryption
- Use OpenPGP as an e-mail standard
- Use GPG for and open-source OpenPGP usage and implementation
- Allows message authentication and integrity checking.