Finally, when they receive your message, they can decrypt it using their private key and read it.Once you encrypt a message with the public key, you can share it with the other person.With the public key they shared with you, you can now encrypt your email.They then share the public key with you, while keeping the private PGP key for themselves.You can share your public key freely, but not the private one The person you want to send the message to needs to generate two keys: one public and one private.Let’s say you want to send a secure email to someone, but worry that a 3rd party or person will read it (like your boss).Here’s a simple explanation of using PGP:
The two need to be able to share public and private keys to communicate securely. How PGP Works?įirst, for PGP to work, it has to be present on both sides of the communication – sender and recipient. This method is slower, but is a lot more secure since the private one is not shared and instead remains with the recipient. The public key is used to encrypt data, while the private one decrypts it. If a 3rd party, like an attacker, intercepts this email, they’ll also have the key.Īsymmetric encryption, on the other hand, uses two keys like we explained – private and public. The benefit of this method is that it is significantly faster, but also less safe since the same key has to be shared between the sender and the recipient in a safe way. In symmetric encryption, only one key is used to encrypt and decrypt. What is symmetric and asymmetric cryptography or encryption? This means that PGP uses both a public and private key and can take the efficiency from the symmetric system and the security of the asymmetric system. PGP is an encryption system developed in 1991 initially as freeware (until its purchase by Symantec in 2010 when it became a licensed software) that fuses two encryption standards: symmetric and asymmetric. On our blog, we already covered PGP encryption in detail, so we’ll give you a short version here.
#Best pgp fot tor how to#
In this article, we’ll go over what PGP is and how it works and also show you how to set up PGP encryption on Linux step-by-step. If your email provider doesn’t protect you with PGP encryption, it’s not really secure. Today PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, is pretty much the standard in email security and encryption.