As part of my cybersecurity posts I’ve decided to write briefly about PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption of email. We will use GPG which stands for GNU Privacy Guard and is a compatible free software equivalent of Symantec’s proprietary encryption algorithm. Both PGP and GPG are interchangeable so you can use either protocol. These keys use a high level of encryption. I Use RSA 4096 for my keys which is possibly a little overkill, but I like to future proof when learning.
GPG is important for emails as it means that an email remains encrypted between the sender & the receiver. It works on the principle of key pairs. Each user generates a pair of keys, one private key remains secret and on the user’s computer, the other, known as a public key is free to distribute on the internet and allows you to pass it on to those you wish to communicate with.