PGP: Pretty Good Privacy
The Privacy Guide is putting together an easy-to-understand tutorial on Pretty Good Privacy encryption, aka PGP. The draft guide is shaping up nicely, and I hope it will encourage more people to encrypt their communications.
Encryption scrambles information by encoding it so only someone with the right password or key can unscramble it. PGP encryption is one of the best encryption systems, which might not be evident based on the name. It really should be called “Very Good Privacy” because it’s virtually impossible to break PGP encryption done right, as you can see from this Q & A example at pgp.net:
Q: Can’t you break PGP by trying all of the possible keys?
A: Let’s say that you had developed a special purpose chip that could try a billion keys per second. This is far beyond anything that could really be developed today. Let’s also say that you could afford to throw a billion such chips at the problem at the same time. It would still require over 10,000,000,000,000 years to try all of the possible 128 bit keys. That is something like a thousand times the age of the known universe! …
Here’s another way to look at it: Encrypting even a short message with PGP is like putting it through a shredder that would cut it into enough shreds to fill the Grand Canyon — a thousand times over!
This is why PGP is considered the “gold standard” for email encryption. Even Edward Snowden has recommended it for protecting communications.
Setting up your own PGP can be difficult, even for those who are tech savvy. It can also be an ongoing hassle to remember the decryption key and then go through the steps to unencrypt email. Of course, this makes it hard to encourage others to adopt PGP, which is essential to making it worthwhile. After all, what good is PGP encrypted email if your correspondents aren’t using it, too?
New services are meeting the demand for easy-to-use PGP encrypted email for everyday use, like StartMail.com. After an easy set up, StartMail allows users to send PGP encrypted email in just one click. Opening and reading a PGP encrypted email is also a snap. I appreciate using StartMail even though I have Open PGP set up on my desktop because StartMail makes routine encryption possible.
I encourage everyone to give PGP a try. Drop me a line if you do. Here’s my PGP/GPG Fingerprint so you can find my public encryption key and feel confident it actually belongs to me: B52B C59B 0571 6DC0 3850 117D 4922 3C7A CE41 D827 (Verified by Twitter here.)
