What is PGP?
PGP refers for Pretty good Privacy. PGP is a
popular public key encoded program that is used in the world to protect the privacy of email, data files, drives and instant messaging.
When the user and receiver don't want any sort of interference in their instant
messaging, they prefers PGP program that prevent the third party to
hack it or to read it. It's first version was developed by Philip Zimmermann and first offered to the public in
1991.
The use of internet is increasing day by day in the entire world, thus being the
cause of heavy traffic on the Internet. Many data packets can be captured
in the way and can be stored for years. Mail servers can also store messages
that can be read currently or in the future time, many times when it
becomes irrelevant and meaningless. Email has not get yet any legal
protection like personnel phone calls and letters as it can be read or can be
edited or hacked in the way.
PGP converts plain text into encoded form and the sender sends it to the receiver,
only receiver can decode it and again it converts in the plain text. None can
decode it in the way neither can read or edit because all the messages are
in unreadable form. So PGP provides privacy that is not available in the online communication.
PGP works in the smart and simple way as it consists of two types
of key pair a public key and a private key. The public key encodes
the messages while the private key decodes them.
The sender can sends his/her message using PGP to generate a key pair by entering a real name or nickname to be associated with the keys and a password. These
two keys are interlocked to each other and appears like a small bits of a
text code. The sender copy and paste it into an email and send it to the receiver
in the in the clear form.
The receiver do the opposite act of the sender. He/She decode the
message what the sender sends it and can read it in the clear form. In
reply He/She can also do the act of encoding the message and sends it to
his/her sender. Thus the communication goes on without any theft and
interruption. The third party can see only the encoded symbol not the
text. The sender can use the digital signature tool in his/ her outgoing mail,
so the receiver can recognize the original mail of the sender.
PGP is also very useful in protecting the stored data. The data can
be downloaded and stored on the hard disk or in the CDs associated with public
key for encoding and private key for decoding. Some versions of PGP
provides the facility to encrypt the whole disk. This is very useful for the
laptops and palmtops.
PGP is an open source software and some versions of PGP is also available with
zero fee for the personnel use. On the other hand the commercial versions of PGP are also available
for multi-using environments within the network.