PGP and S/MIME

PGP is a generally available strong encryption system, which can be used to encrypt documents, so that they can only be read by their intended recipient, and used to sign documents, so that you can verify that a document was in fact written by its purported author, and thus that it has not been altered since.

S/MIME is another open cryptographic system, focused on encryption of mail, and using X.509 certificates.

PGP

Sources

PGP.com is the home of PGP, Inc. Users outside the US should refer to the International PGP page.

Public key servers

PGP international key server redirects you to one of a number of key servers. Details at www.pgp.net. There's a web-based PGP Public Key Server at pgp5.ai.mit.edu, or another gateway to it at Cambridge.

PGP FAQs

There are several PGP FAQs, including PGPi FAQ (about the program and porting effort) a comp.security.pgp FAQ (PGP in general), and the where-to-get-PGP FAQ

ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp/

PGP sources and binaries

http://www.pgpinternational.com/product/

PGP commercial versions.

PGP net

...including key servers. One of the sites here is that of the UKERNA technology group, which set up the (sadly now defunct) UKERNA secure email project to improve the security of email for JANET users. They produced a report on how PGP might be made easier to use.

Secure Email for UK Further and Higher Education

A 2000 October 18 discussion paper from JISC.

Other resources

• The newsgroup alt.security.pgp and the heirarchy comp.security.pgp... cover PGP.
• See Galactus' privacy pages and Ståle Schumacher's International PGP home page for further pointers (same as the PGPi page).
• There's also a PGP timestamping service, which will sign and timestamp files sent to it.
• Information on integrating PGP and MUAs (Pine, Pegasus, Eudora) on my guides page.
• There's a completely free PGP replacement (ie, free for commercial use too) in GNU Privacy Guard (GNUPG).
• An internet standard for PGP is being developed in OpenPGP. This is discussed in RFC 2440, which builds on RFC 1991.
• Other collections of pointers: N M Queen, Jeff Goldberg, Robert Guerra

My PGP public key is available.

S/MIME

• S/MIME FAQ
• S/MIME and OpenPGP
• S/MIME working group
• S/MIME Freeware Library
• S/MIME: Anatomy of a Secure E-mail Standard
• RSA Security's S/MIME central, includes a products page and client interoperability page.