Process
GnuPG encrypts messages using asymmetric keypairs individually generated by GnuPG users. The resulting public keys can be exchanged with other users in a variety of ways, such as Internet key servers. They must always be exchanged carefully to prevent identity spoofing by corrupting public key ↔ "owner" identity correspondences. It is also possible to add a cryptographic digital signature to a message, so the message integrity and sender can be verified, if a particular correspondence relied upon has not been corrupted.
GnuPG also supports symmetric encryption algorithms. By default GnuPG uses the CAST5 symmetrical algorithm.
GnuPG does not use patented or otherwise restricted software or algorithms, like the IDEA encryption algorithm used in PGP. (It is in fact possible to use IDEA in GnuPG by downloading a plugin for it, however this may require getting a license for some uses in some countries in which IDEA is patented.) Instead, GnuPG uses a variety of other, non-patented algorithms, including:
- Block ciphers (symmetric encryption algorithms): CAST5, Camellia, Triple DES, AES, Blowfish, and Twofish.
- Asymmetric-key ciphers: ElGamal and RSA
- Cryptographic hashes: RIPEMD-160, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, and Tiger
- Digital signatures: DSA and RSA
GnuPG is a hybrid encryption software program in that it uses a combination of conventional symmetric-key cryptography for speed, and public-key cryptography for ease of secure key exchange, typically by using the recipient's public key to encrypt a session key which is only used once. This mode of operation is part of the OpenPGP standard and has been part of PGP from its first version.
Read more about this topic: GNU Privacy Guard
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“It is part of the nature of consciousness, of how the mental apparatus works, that free reason is only a very occasional function of people’s “thinking” and that much of the process is made of reactions as standardized as those of the keys on a typewriter.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)