E-mail Encryption and Digital Signature Standards

OpenPGP is the current standard for secure e-mail communication. See the OpenPGP site for more information. These standards are implemented by PGP, GPG, and directly by some e-mail clients.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), originally written by Phil Zimmerman, is distributed (for free for individual use) by MIT. Certain versions of PGP may not be appropriate for international use due to dependence on cryptographic tools with export restrictions.
GnuPG (the Gnu Privacy Guard). GPG suffers from no export restrictions and is open source. GnuPGP is distributed (for free, of course) by the FSF. I use GPG; you may find my public key here [GPG Key].

The above two sites contain in-depth discussions of how to use these tools. Regardless of your feelings about open source and software licensing, if you care about privacy and security you should always use open-source cryptographic tools or, at the very least, tools which are standards compliant.

Alexander Russell

Last modified: Mon Aug 20 10:21:55 EDT 2001