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GNU Privacy Guard - OpenPGP

Thawte Web of Trust - Have your x.509 certificate notarized in Montreal, QC, Canada

Attend an OpenPGP meetup in your city/country and have your public key signed!

International visitors,
choose a translation :

OpenPGP Encryption and X.509 certificates

If you are looking for Thawte notarization services or OpenPGP public key (identity) signing services, please visit my Web of Trust section.

The goal of the information presented here is to shed some light over different existing and emerging technologies about encryption and other security subjects. This is by no means a complete or perfect guide. Most topics are Thawte x.509 certs and OpenPGP related. If you'd like to contribute to it, please contact me by using this form.

If you are a newcomer to cryptography, here are some good starting points:

Short history of OpenPGP

A standard now known as OpenPGP emerged from the original PGP software and is now the most widely used email encryption standard in the world.

1991 - Philip Zimmermann, a software engineer, creates PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") a strong cryptography software "originally designed for human rights applications, and to protect privacy and civil liberties in the information age".

DEC 1996 - PGP Inc. is founded by Zimmermann, after a three-year criminal investigation is dropped by the US government. The investigation was supposed to prove that Zimmermann violated US export restrictions for cryptographic software when PGP spread all around the world following its publication as freeware.

DEC 1997 - Network Associates Inc. (NAI) acquires PGP Inc.

DEC 1997 - G10 first release, which would later become GPG

NOV 1998 - RFC 2440 is published, with "all necessary information needed to develop interoperable applications based on the OpenPGP format", as the first step to establish OpenPGP as an IETF open (encryption) standard

Late 2000 - NAI makes PGP no longer open source (meaning their source code is no longer available)

FEB 2001 - Zimmermann quits NAI and starts the OpenPGP Alliance, "a growing group of companies and other organizations that are implementers of the OpenPGP standard".

OCT 2001 - NAI announces a reorganization of the PGP Security Business including integration of PGP Security products into the McAfee and Sniffer business units.

APR 2002 - NAI drops support of PGP Mail, the commercial version of the original PGP from which others followed, including PGPfile, PGPicq, etc.

MAY 2002 - Version 1.0.7 of the GNU Privacy Guard is available for download. This is a major release of a complete and free replacement of PGP.

AUG 2002 - PGP Corporation Announces Purchase of PGP Desktop from Network Associates.

SEP 2002 - GnuPG 1.2 released.

OCT 2002 - GnuPG 1.2.1 released

NOV 2002 - WinPT+GnuPG graphical installer released

DEC 2002 - PGP 8.0 released

Some useful links:

  • OpenPGPAlliance - a growing group of companies and other organizations that are implementers of the OpenPGP standard
  • The GNU Privacy Guard software (GPG) - a complete and free replacement for the original command-line based PGP
  • GNU General Public License, Using GnuPG legally - information on licensing and usage of GnuPG
  • GnuPG FrontEnds including links to mail clients, interfaces and other software supporting GnuPG
    • WinPT, Windows Privacy Tray, a taskbar utility that supports Windows 95,98,2000, etc. for doing data encryption or decryption. This program is free software under the terms of the GNU GPL.
    • Enigmail for Mozilla - a plugin for Mozilla/Netscape Mail on multiple platforms
    • EntourageGPG - a GnuPG front end for Microsoft Entourage on Mac
  • PGP Inc. - a provider of commercial OpenPGP-compatible solutions, including the original PGPMail
  • History of PGP

If you wish to reproduce this short history on your site, you may do so by inserting some code on any HTML page:

  • If you can use PHP on your server, use this:
    <? include("http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/encryption/openpgp_history.php"); ?>
  • If you have no other choice but JavaScript, you can try this (but test it, I've seen results vary!):
    <script language="JavaScript" src="http://fabianrodriguez.com/encryption/openpgp_history.php?v=js"></script>
    <noscript><B>JavaScript required to view this content.</b></noscript>

What is Thawte ?

Thawte is a company issuing X.509 digital certificates known as "FreeMail" certificates. A great advantage of using Thawte certificates is that they can be easily used with S/MIME-compliant secure mail clients, such as Microsoft Outlook Express and Netscape Communicator 4.x. They are free, but everytime time it expires, you have to change your certificate, which means having to re-send your public key. This is also true if you change your OS/Browser/email and have not previously exported your certificate.

To find out more about Thawte:


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