I need to apologize that even I've publish all available information about the PGP encryption, I never actually updated why they were there on the first place. Okay, let me explain the usage of PGP.

PGP was conceived as a security application and very useful especially to protect information. You can virtually use PGP to:

1. Send/Receive encrypted email
2. Encrypt file so that they are unreadable by normal means

Why do you need to encrypt an email at the first place? You see, when you send an email to your friend, that email is simply encrypted by a simple algorithm in order to facilite the integrity of the message. This is called message encapsulation where information will be added in front and at the end of the email message and the body will be encrypted so that by the time the server receives/sends the message, the integrity will not fail so easily. Let me demonstrate a simple operation:

This is a message
If you send through as a serial stream line, it might get distorted. You might get:

Th si am essa
So in order to minimize the loss, the message is encrypted with front and back encapsulation. I cannot print them out here as they are using non-Unicode¹ characters. However of course the signal might still lost during in transit, that's where the encapsulation is put to work. The receiving end computer will read the content and look for the consistency in the print. This is called CRC or Cycle Redundency Check, where it will determine whether the message received is complete or not.

However on security, the only objective is to put the text in an unreadable state until decrypted. As you can see from my previous post, a standard PGP message contains lots of Roman characters from A to Z, a to z & additional characters like + and /. Without using special codes, those characters tend to be longer at least it will be streamlined & standardized.

Many people are not aware that email message is easily read by the server administrator. There are even some node operators who set up software client which picks up message packets. With time, it will assemble the packet into a whole message. Therefore, email is still not very secure if you value your privacy.

However as for the encryption, there are levels to determine how hard for it to crack your message. I've read somewhere that a standard PGP ues a 128-bit key will take 48 years to decrypt on a standard supercomputer. Imagine what that will do on a 1024 or 2048 bit! Higher encryption means longer time for the computer to decrypt the message as well. So, beware on the level of encryption if you decided to adopt the PGP!

PGP is a concept and also a commercial program. However, there are some version where you can download it for free. You can find more information about PGP on the following site:

The International PGP Page
Private Idaho Email
PGP Page For International User

¹ Unicode is a standard used to display standard English characters on a computer because there are just so many ways to display English characters. This made software programmer's job easier to display English characters without fear of incompatibility.