4. PGP – Pretty Good Privacy
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) by Philip R. Zimmermann is the
de-facto standard software for the encryption of electronic mail and other
sensitive files. Its public-key cryptography system
enables people who have never met to secure transmitted messages against
unauthorized reading and to add digital signatures to messages to guarantee
their authenticity.
If you regularly send e-mail to
people that contain passwords or other sensitive information, this is a good way
to be sure that the person you send mail to is really the person you think it
is. When you are encrypting a
message to be sent to someone, you encrypt the message with the recipient's
public key. Then, the only way the message can be decrypted is with the
recipient's private key.
You can download the latest
version of PGP from ftp://ftp.replay.com/pub/crypto/pgp.
For more information, see the MIT distribution site at http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html.
