How Pretty Good Privacy works, and how you can use it for secure communication
Sending sensitive information through the internet is always nerve-racking. What if somebody else sees the bank information I’m sending? Or even those dank memes that should not be spoken of?
Fortunately, there’s a pretty good solution to this problem: Pretty Good Privacy (PGP).
A software engineer named Phil Zimmermann created PGP back in 1991. He was an anti-nuclear activist, and wanted a way to transfer information securely over the Internet.
Zimmermann got into trouble with the US government in 1993 because PGP travelled international waters and reached a vast number of countries around the globe, violating US export restrictions for cryptographic software.
Today, PGP is “owned” by Symantec, but OpenPGP, an e-mail encryption standard, is implemented by multiple software.
You might also hear a lot about GPG. It is another software tool that implements the OpenPGP standard.
How does PGP actually work?
PGP is very easy to understand, on the surface. Imagine you want to send your credit card information to a friend and you write it on a piece of paper. You then put the paper in a box and send it by mail.
