1/31/2024 0 Comments Gnu privacy guard developersPrivate initiatives never gathered much attention. Many users did not understand why they should encrypt their email at all, and attempts to integrate the tools with email clients were not particularly intuitive.īig corporations such as Microsoft, Google and Apple shunned it – to this day, they do not ship PGP with their products, although some are now implementing forms of end-to-end encryption.įinally, there was the issue of distributing public keys - they had to be made available to other people to be useful. Both use highly technical language, and the latter is still known for being accessible only by typing out commands - an anachronism even in the late 1990s, when most operating systems already used the mouse. Neither Zimmermann’s original PGP nor the later GnuPG managed to become entirely user-friendly. Jon Callas/Flickr, CC BY The challenge facing security softwareĭespite Zimmermann’s work, the dream of free encryption for everyone never quite came to full bloom. PGP was meant to be used for email, but could be used for any kind of electronic communication. Zimmermann published PGP because he believed that everybody has a right to private communication. It helps decrypt messages or “sign” them - the digital equivalent of a seal to prove origin and authenticity. The “private” or “secret” key must be known only to the user. The so-called “public” key is meant to be distributed to everyone and is used to encrypt messages or verify a “signature”. It was invented in the 1970s by researchers at the British intelligence service GCHQ and then again by Stanford University academics in the US, although GCHQ’s results were only declassified in 1997.Īsymmetric cryptography gives users two keys. The story of its discovery is itself worth telling. PGP implements a form of cryptography that is known as “asymmetric cryptography” or public-key cryptography. A number of software packages implement this standard, of which GnuPG is perhaps the best-known. Zimmermann later worked with the PGP Corporation, which helped define PGP as an open internet standard, OpenPGP. To circumvent US export regulations and ship the software legally to other countries, hackers even printed the source code as a book, which would allow anyone to scan it at its destination and rebuild the software from scratch. Zimmermann had been facing serious punishment for posting PGP on the internet in 1991, which could have been seen as a violation of the Arms Export Control Act. In the 1990s, the US restricted the export of strong cryptography, viewing it as sensitive technology that had once been the exclusive purview of the intelligence and military establishment.
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