Just the body text and any attachments.Īnother problem with PGP is that it does not use Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). When PGP is used to secure emails, the metadata - such as email addresses of both the sender and recipient, date and time of sending, and e-mail’s subject line - is not encrypted. This is an open-source 100% compatible clone of the original PGP, which is now closed-source software owned by Symantec. When discussing PGP these days we almost always mean OpenPGP.

Public key – distributed so that others can use it to encrypt mail for sending to youįor this tutorial, we’ll stick to how to use PGP for encrypting emails, but PGP keypairs are also very useful for signing and verifying digital signatures.

Private key – kept secret and used to decrypt own mail.

They also have a public key, which they freely so that other people can use it to send them encrypted emails. The important thing to remember, however, is that PGP uses public-key cryptography.Įach user has a private key which they keep secret and use to decrypt emails sent to them using their public key.

The details of how PGP works are, to be honest, rather complicated. It can also be used for signing and encrypting all sorts of other stuff but is mainly used to secure emails.

PGP does have a number of issues (discussed below), but it is still the most widely used email encryption system, and therefore the most interoperable with others no matter which platform or email service they use.

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