- A Quick PGP Overview
- Getting and Installing GNU Privacy Guard (GPG)
- Generating Your Keys
- Working with Keys
- Using GPG: Nuts and Bolds
- Summary
Getting and Installing GNU Privacy Guard (GPG)
The GNU Privacy Guard implementation of PGP is largely compatible with the various encryption algorithms implemented by commercial versions of PGP, with the exception of one type of encryption, the IDEA algorithm, which remains under patent until the year 2007. RSA encryption, whose patent has recently expired, is now included in the standard GPG distribution. The GPG home page can be found at http://www.gpg.org/.
GPG can be downloaded from http://www.gpg.org/download.html. As this text goes to press, the most recent version of GPG is 1.0.4, and one important security patch has been released. To install GPG, download both the gnupg-1.0.4.tar.gz file and the patch file, gnupg-1.0.4.security-patch1.diff.
Extract the GPG sources and apply the patch; then run the configure script in the GPG source tree. The default installation options are adequate for most users. After running configure on the patched sources, run make and then make install to install the GPG binaries and other components.
$ tar -xzf gnupg-1.0.4.tar.gz $ cd gnupg-1.0.4 $ patch -p1 <../gnupg-1.0.4.security-patch1.diff patching file g10/mainproc.c patching file g10/plaintext.c patching file g10/openfile.c $ ./configure ...[ Output of configure ]... $ make ...[ Output of make ]... $ su Password: # make install ...[ Output of make install ]... # exit $
Assuming that everything installed cleanly, you can proceed to the next step, setting yourself up with a pair of keys and learning how to use the software.
If you are unable to cleanly compile and install GPG, a number of pre-built packages are available for many distributions, including Debian and many RPM-based distributions.