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The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free software replacement for the PGP suite of cryptographic software, released under the GNU General Public License. It is a part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU software project. GPG is completely compliant with the IETF standard for OpenPGP, and is supported by the German government. Current versions of PGP (and Veridis' Filecrypt) are interoperable with GPG and other OpenPGP-compliant systems. Although some older versions of PGP are also interoperable, not all features of newer software are supported by the older software. It is necessary for users to understand those incompatibilities and work around them. 1 History
GPG was initially developed by Werner Koch. Version 1.0.0 was released on September 7th, 1999. The German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology has funded the documentation and the port to Microsoft Windows in 2000.
Because GPG is an OpenPGP standard compliant system, the history of OpenPGP is of importance. See both PGP and OpenPGP for more information.
2 Users of GnuPG
GPG is stable, production-quality software. It is frequently included in free operating systems, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSDNetBSD was the first of the freely redistributable, open-source versions of the BSD Unix-like operating systems to produce a formal release, with NetBSD 0. 8 (May 1993). NetBSD and FreeBSD are derived from the original UCB 4. 3BSD via the Networking/2 rel and nearly all distributions of GNU/Linux.
Although the basic GPG program has a command line interfaceA command line interface or CLI is a method of interacting with a computer by giving it lines of textual commands (that is, a sequence of characters) either from keyboard input or from a script. It is occasionally also referred to as a CLUE for Command Li, there exist various front-ends that provide it with a graphical user interfaceA graphical user interface (or GUI pronounced "gooey") is a method of interacting with a computer through a metaphor of direct manipulation of graphical images and widgets in addition to text. GUIs and PUIs The precursor to GUIs was invented by researcher; for example, it has been integrated into KMailKmail is the email client in KDE. It supports folders, filtering, viewing HTML mail, and international character sets. It can send mail to any program or to an arbitrary port (normally 25) of a mail server. External links Free software Email clients. and EvolutionEvolution or Novell Evolution (formerly Ximian Evolution is the official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. It combines E-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management. It has been an official part o, the graphical email clientsAn email client (or MUA as in mail user agent is a computer program that is used to read and send email. Protocols supported by email clients include POP3 and IMAP. IMAP and the updated IMAP4 are optimized for storage of email on the server, while the POP found in the most popular LinuxThis article is about Linux-based operating systems, GNU/Linux, and related topics. See Linux kernel for the kernel itself. See Linux (washing powder) for the Swiss brand of washing powder. Tux, a plump penguin, is the official Linux mascot Linux is the n desktops KDE and GNOME. A program known as Enigmail allows GPG to be integrated with Mozilla and Thunderbird, which works on Microsoft Windows as well as Linux and other operating systems. Note that, because the plugin mechanism is not part of GPG itself and not specified by the Open PGP standard, and because neither the GPG nor Open PGP developers were involved in their development, it is possible that GPG's security benefits could be compromised or even lost as a result of using such auxiliaries.
GPG can also be compiled for other platforms like Mac OS X and Windows. For Mac OS X, there is a free port called MacGPG which has been adapted to use the OS X user interface and its native class definitions. Cross compilation is not a trivial exercise, at least in part because security provisions vary with operating system and adapting to them is often tricky, but high quality compilers should routinely produce executables which will interoperate correctly with other GPG implementations.
