Pretty Good Privacy [PGP]

« Back to Glossary Index

A computer program (and related protocols) that uses cryptography to provide data security for electronic mail and other applications on the Internet.

Pretty Good Privacy (Wikipedia)

Not to be confused with GNU Privacy Guard (GPG).

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications. Phil Zimmermann developed PGP in 1991.

Pretty Good Privacy
Original author(s)
Developer(s)Broadcom Inc.
Initial release1991; 32 years ago (1991)
Stable release
11.2.0 / April 16, 2018; 5 years ago (2018-04-16)
Written inC
Operating systemLinux (and Android), macOS, Windows
PlatformMulti platform
Standard(s)
  • OpenPGP
    • RFC 4880 OpenPGP Message Format
    • RFC 5581 The Camellia Cipher in OpenPGP
    • RFC 6637 Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in OpenPGP
  • PGP/MIME
    • RFC 2015 MIME Security with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
    • RFC 3156 MIME Security with OpenPGP
TypeEncryption software
LicenseCommercial proprietary software
Websiteopenpgp.org Edit this on Wikidata

PGP and similar software follow the OpenPGP, an open standard of PGP encryption software, standard (RFC 4880) for encrypting and decrypting data. Modern versions of PGP are interoperable with GnuPG and other OpenPGP-compliant systems.

This Video Sponsored by Dale