Are you looking for a safe way to encrypt your files and messages? What if there is a method that can do all that and more and yet it is FREE to use? If you are interested, keep reading to know about encrypting and exchanging files safely with GPG and PGP.
GPG is an acronym for Gnu Privacy Guard. It was developed as a free and open source alternative to PGP , a famous commercial encryption product. Both GPG and PGP can encrypt and decrypt data on your system, in addition they can be used to authenticate emails and files you exchange with other people, this means that if Bob is sending files and emails to Alice, she can check if the data has been altered in the way by any third party and if the sender is Bob for sure and no one else. Furthermore, with these applications, Bob can also make sure that only Alice will be able to decrypt and read/view the data he is sending.

Before proceeding with how this works in practice, let me first start with a small formal introduction to the protocol these programs use, that is OpenPGP (RFC 4880 ).

OpenGPG

OpenPGP is the most used email encryption standard now a day. It uses public-keys in combination with symmetric cryptography and hash-function to provide security solutions for electronic communications and data storage. Any OpenPGP software should support data confidentiality, integrity and authentication.

So OpenGPG is the standard or the protocol, while PGP and GPG are the applications you can use.

The link for this article located at Hack This Site is no longer available.