<metaproperty="og:description"content="When “pretty good” is good enough PGP stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”. It’s a set of algorithms for encrypting, compressing, and signing…">
<metaname="twitter:title"content="You down with PGP? Yeah you know me!">
<metaname="twitter:description"content="When “pretty good” is good enough PGP stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”. It’s a set of algorithms for encrypting, compressing, and signing…">
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<h2id="Circling-back-to-GPG"><ahref="#Circling-back-to-GPG"class="headerlink"title="Circling back to GPG"></a>Circling back to <abbrtitle="GNU Privacy Guard">GPG</abbr></h2>
<p>What if Alice and Bob were never in the same room together? As soon as anyone, outside Alice and Bob, put their hands on a One-time pad, it should be considered compromised and, for all intents and purposes, useless.</p>
<p>This is where <em>Asymmetric encryption</em> comes in. <abbrtitle="GNU Privacy Guard">GPG</abbr> uses something called <strong>key-pairs</strong>. When Bob wants to get secret information he makes his key pair with an encryption function.
That key pair consists of a <em>public</em> key and a <em>private</em> key. Anyone can know the public key. It’s public, and won’t compromise the security of the message. Alice also has a key pair. The purpose of these public keys are to
both encrypt data and authenticate data. If Alice uses Bob’s public key, she can encrypt any data she likes using it. The only thing that can then decrypt that data, is Bob’s private key. Alice can also sign that encrypted message with her
private key and Bob can use Alice’s public key to confirm that it was in fact signed by Alice and therefore likely to contain data that Alice encrypted. Let’s suppose Alice didn’t sign the message she sent to Bob. </p>
That key pair consists of a <em>public</em> key and a <em>private</em> key. Anyone can know the public key. It’s public, and won’t compromise the security of the message. Sometimes it’s helpful to think of the public key as more of a public
lock. Anyone can put a message in a box and lock it with that public lock but only Bob can unlock it. Alice also has a key pair. The purpose of these public keys are to both encrypt data and authenticate data. If Alice uses Bob’s public
key, she can encrypt any data she likes using it. The only thing that can then decrypt that data, is Bob’s private key. Alice can also sign that encrypted message with her private key and Bob can use Alice’s public key to confirm that it
was in fact signed by Alice and therefore likely to contain data that Alice encrypted. Let’s suppose Alice didn’t sign the message she sent to Bob. </p>
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PGP stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”. It’s a set of algorithms for encrypting, compressing, and signing data so that a specific person can open and read that...">
